Mar 10, 2025
An Interpretable Classifier based on Large scale Social Network Analysis
Monojit Banerjee
Mechanistic model interpretability is essential to understand AI decision making, ensuring safety, aligning with human values, improving model reliability and facilitating research. By revealing internal processes, it promotes transparency, mitigates risks, and fosters trust, ultimately leading to more effective and ethical AI systems in critical areas. In this study, we have explored social network data from BlueSky and built an easy-to-train, interpretable, simple classifier using Sparse Autoencoders features. We have used these posts to build a financial classifier that is easy to understand. Finally, we have visually explained important characteristics.
The project addresses an important problem by trying to make financial sentiment analysis more interpretable. The use of SAEs and decision trees is a reasonable approach for achieving interpretability. The paper is clearly written and structured, but could do with more details on implementation and the threat model, which is currently somewhat vague - a more detailed discussion of potential failure modes and mitigation strategies would strengthen the AI safety aspect. It would also be valuable to include a more thorough error analysis and discussion of the limitations of the approach. I'd encourage you to dive a bit more into the literature on mech interp to help with the analysis of the SAE features, and/or adversarial robustness in NLP to inform strategies for making similar systems more resilient to manipulation.
Good work over the hackathon - well done, and interesting approach using a novel social media platform! I've seen references to current research re. SAEs and decision tree classifiers, I'd recommend engaging with the available literature more thoroughly - potentially with a focus on finance. It's definitely interesting to think about the interpretability of sentiment analysis but moving forwards, I'd spend some time detailing all potential applications and impacts to the AI safety space. As is stated in the 'Discussion and Conclusion' section, future work should use data outside of just BlueSky / social media to broaden the research - I think this should be a priority. It would also be interesting to compare these results to more traditional interpretability techniques.
Cite this work
@misc {
title={
An Interpretable Classifier based on Large scale Social Network Analysis
},
author={
Monojit Banerjee
},
date={
3/10/25
},
organization={Apart Research},
note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},
howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}
}
