
Premium content
Access to this content requires a subscription. You must be a premium user to view this content.

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.
Leave-One-Out (LOO) provides an intuitive measure of feature importance but is computationally prohibitive. While Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) offers a potentially efficient alternative, its axiomatic soundness in modern Transformers remains under-examined. In this work, we first show that the bilinear propagation rules used in recent advances of AttnLRP violate implementation invariance. We prove this analytically and confirm it empirically in linear attention layers. Second, we also revisit CP-LRP as a diagnostic baseline and find that bypassing relevance propagation through the softmax layer---back-propagating relevance only through the value matrices---significantly improves alignment with LOO, particularly in the middle-to-late Transformer layers. Overall, our results suggest that (i) bilinear factorization sensitivity and (ii) softmax propagation error potentially jointly undermine LRP’s ability to approximate LOO in Transformers.
