# prediction_via_shapley_value_regression__40e3c328.pdf Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Amr Alkhatib 1 Roman Bresson 2 Henrik Bostr om 2 Michalis Vazirgiannis 2 3 Shapley values have several desirable, theoretically well-supported, properties for explaining black-box model predictions. Traditionally, Shapley values are computed post-hoc, leading to additional computational cost at inference time. To overcome this, a novel method, called Via SHAP, is proposed, that learns a function to compute Shapley values, from which the predictions can be derived directly by summation. Two approaches to implement the proposed method are explored; one based on the universal approximation theorem and the other on the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. Results from a large-scale empirical investigation are presented, showing that Via SHAP using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks performs on par with state-of-the-art algorithms for tabular data. It is also shown that the explanations of Via SHAP are significantly more accurate than the popular approximator Fast SHAP on both tabular data and images. 1. Introduction The application of machine learning algorithms in some domains requires communicating the reasons behind predictions with the aim of building trust in the predictive models and, more importantly, addressing legal and ethical considerations (Lakkaraju et al., 2017; Goodman & Flaxman, 2017). Nevertheless, many state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms result in black-box models, precluding the user s ability to follow the reasoning behind the predictions. Consequently, explainable machine learning methods have gained notable attention as a means to acquire needed explainability without sacrificing performance. 1 Orebro University, School of Science and Technology, Sweden 2KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Sweden 3 Ecole Polytechnique, IP Paris, France. Correspondence to: Amr Alkhatib . Proceedings of the 42 nd International Conference on Machine Learning, Vancouver, Canada. PMLR 267, 2025. Copyright 2025 by the author(s). Machine learning explanation methods employ a variety of strategies to produce explanations, e.g., the use of local interpretable surrogate models (Ribeiro et al., 2016), generation of counterfactual examples (Karimi et al., 2020; Dandl et al., 2020; Mothilal et al., 2020; Van Looveren & Klaise, 2021; Guo et al., 2021; Guyomard et al., 2022), selection of important features (Chen et al., 2018; Yoon et al., 2019; Jethani et al., 2021), and approximation of Shapley values (Lundberg & Lee, 2017; Lundberg et al., 2020; Frye et al., 2021; Covert & Lee, 2021; Jethani et al., 2022). Methods that generate explanations based on Shapley values are prominent since they offer a unique solution that meets a set of theoretically established, desirable properties. The computation of Shapley values can, however, be computationally expensive. Recent work has therefore focused on reducing the running time (Lundberg & Lee, 2017; Lundberg et al., 2020; Jethani et al., 2022) and enhancing the accuracy of approximations (Frye et al., 2021; Aas et al., 2021; Covert & Lee, 2021; Mitchell et al., 2022; Kolpaczki et al., 2024). However, the Shapley values are computed post-hoc, and hence entail a computational overhead, even when approximated, e.g., as in the case of Fast SHAP (Jethani et al., 2022). Generating instance-based explanations or learning a pre-trained explainer always demands further data, time, and resources. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, computing Shapley values as a means to form predictions has not yet been considered. The main contributions of this study are: a novel machine learning method, Via SHAP, that trains a model to simultaneously provide accurate predictions and Shapley values multiple implementations of the proposed method are explored, using both the universal approximation theorem and the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, which are evaluated through a large-scale empirical investigation In the following section, we cover fundamental concepts about the Shapley value and, along the way, introduce our notation. Section 3 describes the proposed method. In Section 4, results from a large-scale empirical investigation are presented and discussed. Section 5 provides a brief overview of the related work. Finally, in the concluding Prediction via Shapley Value Regression remarks, we summarize the main conclusions and outline directions for future work. 2. Preliminaries 2.1. The Shapley Value In game theory, a game in coalitional form is a formal model for a scenario in which players form coalitions, and the game s payoff is shared between the coalition members. A coalitional game focuses on the behavior of the players and typically involves a finite set of players N = {1, 2, . . . , n} (Manea, 2016). A coalitional game also involves a characteristic set function v : 2N R that assigns a payoff, a real number, to a coalition S N such that: v( ) = 0 (Owen, 1995.). Different concepts can be employed to distribute the payoff among the players of a coalitional game to achieve a fair and stable allocation. Such solution concepts include the Core, the Nucleolus, and the Shapley Value (Manea, 2016; Ferguson, 2018). The Shapley Value is a solution concept that allocates payoffs to the players according to their marginal contributions across possible coalitions. The Shapley value ϕi(v) of player i in game v is given by (Shapley, 1953): |S|!(n |S| 1)! n! (v(S {i}) v(S)). The term |S|!(n |S| 1)! n! is a combinatorial weighting factor for the different coalitions that can be formed for game v. The difference term (v(S {i}) v(S)) represents the additional value that player i contributes to the coalition S, i.e., the marginal contribution of player i. Given a game v, an additive explanation model µ is an interpretable approximation of v which can be written as (Lundberg & Lee, 2017; Covert & Lee, 2021): µ(S) = δ0(v) + X with δ0(v) a constant and δi(v) the payoff of player i. µ is a linear model whose weights are the payoffs of each player. Using the Shapley values as the payoffs is the only solution in the class of additive feature attribution methods that satisfies the following properties (Young, 1985): Property 1. (Local Accuracy): the solution matches the prediction of the underlying model: i N ϕi(v) = v(N) Property 2. (Missingness): Players without impact on the prediction attributed a value of zero. Let i N: S N \ {i}, v(S) = v(S {i}) ϕi(v) = 0 Property 3. (Consistency): The Shapley value grows or remains the same if a player s contribution grows or stays the same. Let v and v two games over N, let i N: S N \ {i}, v(S {i}) v(S) v (S {i}) v (S) ϕi(v) ϕi(v ) In the context of explainable machine learning, the Shapley value is commonly computed post-hoc to explain the predictions of trained machine learning models. Let f be a trained model whose inputs are defined on n features and whose output y Y R. We also define a baseline or neutral instance, noted 0 X. For a given instance x, the Shapley value is computed over each feature to explain the difference in output x X and the baseline. The baseline may be determined depending on the context, but common examples include the average of all examples in the training set, or one that is commonly used as a threshold (Izzo et al., 2021). In this context, a coalitional game for S can be derived from the model, where the players are the features, and the value function v represents how the prediction changes as different coalitions of features are masked out. In this game, a player i getting picked for coalition S means that its corresponding feature s value is xi, otherwise it remains at its baseline value 0i. The Shapley values for this game can then be obtained as the solution of an optimization problem. The objective is to determine a set of values that accurately represent the marginal contributions of each feature while verifying properties 1 through 3. In the literature, they were obtained by minimizing the following weighted least squares loss function (Marichal & Mathonet, 2011; Lundberg & Lee, 2017; Patel et al., 2021): L(vx, µx) = X S N ω(S) vx(S) µx(S) 2 , (1) where ω is a weighting kernel, the choice of the kernel can result in a solution equivalent to the Shapley value (Covert & Lee, 2021; Covert et al., 2021). Therefore, (Lundberg & Lee, 2017) proposed the Shapley kernel: ωShap(S) = (n 1) n |S| |S| (n |S|). (2) Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Note that, for a d-dimensional output with d > 1, each output is considered as a different unidimensional model. That is, each of the d dimensions will define a different game, and thus a different set of n Shapley values. The explanation of the output is thus an n d matrix of Shapley values, providing the contribution of each input feature to each output game. This can trivially be obtained through the same optimization process by stacking d loss functions such as in (1). Thus, we will consider in the following that y be unidimensional unless otherwise specified. 2.3. Kernel SHAP Computing the exact Shapley values is a demanding process as it requires evaluating all possible coalitions of feature values. There are 2n 1 possible coalitions for a model with n features, each of which has to be evaluated to determine the features marginal contributions, which renders the exact computation of Shapley values infeasible for models with a relatively large number of features. Consequently, (Lundberg & Lee, 2017) proposed Kernel SHAP as a more feasible method to approximate the Shapley values. Kernel SHAP samples a subset of coalitions instead of evaluating all possible coalitions. The explanation model is learned by solving the following optimization problem (Covert & Lee, 2021; Jethani et al., 2022): ϕ(vx) = arg min ϕx Rn E p(S) h vx(S) vx(0) 1 S ϕx 2i (3) s.t. 1 ϕx = vx(S) vx(0) (4) where 1S is the mask corresponding to S, i.e., which takes value 1 for features in S and 0 otherwise, and the distribution p(S) is proportional to the Shapley kernel (2) (Covert & Lee, 2021; Jethani et al., 2022). Equation (4) is referred to as the efficiency constraint. Different value functions (v) can be applied to marginalize features out, such as: 1. Baseline Removal (Sundararajan & Najmi, 2020): vx(S) = f x S, E XN\S ; θ 2. Interventional/Marginal Expectations (Chen et al., 2020): vx(S) = E x S f x S, XN\S; θ 3. Observational/Conditional Expectations: vx(S) = E x S f XS; θ |XS = x S 2.4. Fast SHAP Although Kernel SHAP provides a practical solution for the Shapley value estimation, the optimization problem 3 must be solved separately for every prediction. Additionally, Kernel SHAP requires many samples to converge to accurate estimations for the Shapley values, and this problem is exacerbated with high dimensional data (Covert & Lee, 2021). Consequently, Fast SHAP (Jethani et al., 2022) has been proposed to efficiently learn a parametric Shapley value function and eliminate the need to solve a separate optimization problem for each prediction. The model ϕfast : X Rn, parameterized by θ is then trained to produce the Shapley value for an input by minimizing the following loss function: L(θ) = E q(x) E p(S) h vx(S) vx(0) 1 S ϕfast(x; θ) 2i where q(x) is the distribution of the input data, and p(S) is proportional to the Shapley kernel defined in (2). In the case of a multidimensional output, a uniform sampling is done over the possible output dimensions. The accuracy of ϕfast in approximating the Shapley value depends on the expressiveness of the model class employed as well as the data available for learning ϕfast as a post-hoc function. 3. Via SHAP We introduce Via SHAP, a method that formulates predictions via Shapley values regression. In contrast to the previous approaches, the Shapley values are not computed in a post-hoc setup. Instead, the learning of Shapley values is integrated into the training of the predictive model and exploits every data example in the training data. Moreover, unlike (Chen et al., 2023b), Via SHAP does not impose a specific neural network design or constrain the explanation to a subset of input features, as is in (Wang et al., 2021). At inference time, the Shapley values are used directly to generate the prediction. The following subsections outline how Via SHAP is trained to simultaneously produce accurate predictions and their corresponding Shapley values. 3.1. Predicting Shapley Values Let X Rn and Y Rd, respectively, the input and output spaces, and M = {1, , d} the set of output dimensions. We define a model Via SHAP : X Y which, for a given instance x, computes both the Shapley values and the predicted output in a single process. First, ϕVia : X Rn d computes a matrix of values ϕVia(x; θ). Then, Via SHAP predicts the output vector as Via SHAP(x) = 1 ϕVia(x; θ) i.e., summing column-wise. A link function σ can be applied to accommodate a valid range of outputs y = σ(1 ϕVia(x; θ) , e.g., the sigmoid function for binary classification or softmax for multi-class classification. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 1. Via SHAP generates predictions by first estimating the Shapley values, whose summation produces the final outcome. Via SHAP computes the Shapley values prior to each prediction formulation, as illustrated in Figure 1. Similar to Kernel SHAP and Fast SHAP (in equation (3) and equation (5)), ϕVia is trained by minimizing the weighted least squares loss of the predicted Shapley values, as shown in equation (6). However, no pre-defined black-box model is available beforehand to train the ϕVia explainer. Instead, the Via SHAP predictor is provided as a black box at each training step. h Via SHAP j (x S) Via SHAP j (0) 1 S ϕVia j (x; θ) 2i . Given that the ground truth Shapley values are inaccessible during training, the learning process relies solely on sampling input features, based on the principle that unselected features should be assigned a Shapley value of zero, while the prediction formulated using the selected features should be equal to the sum of their corresponding Shapley values. Since ϕVia and Via SHAP are essentially the same model, coalition sampling for both functions is performed within the same model but at different locations. For Via SHAP(x S), the sampling occurs on the input features before feeding them to the model. While 1 S ϕVia sampling is applied to the predicted Shapley values, given the original set of features as input to the model, as illustrated in Figure 2. In the following, we show that the solution computed by the optimized ϕVia(x; θ ) function maintains the desirable properties of Shapley values for each output dimension. For ease of notation, we drop the subscript j below and consider one output at a time. All proofs, unless otherwise specified, can be found in the Appendix. Lemma 3.1. ϕVia(x; θ) satisfies the property of local accuracy wrt Via SHAP. Lemma 3.2. The global minimizer model, ϕVia(x; θ ), of the loss function (6), assigns value zero to features that have no influence on the outcome predicted by Via SHAP(x) in the distribution p(S). Lemma 3.3. Let two Via SHAP models V and V whose respective ϕVia are parameterized by θ and θ , which globally optimize loss function (6) over two possibly differ- ent targets y and y . Then, given a feature i N: S N \{i}, V(x S {i}) V(x S) V (x S {i}) V (x S) ϕVia i (x; θ ) ϕVia i (x; θ ) Theorem 3.4. The global optimizer function ϕVia(x; θ ) computes the exact Shapley values of the predictions of Via SHAP(x). Theorem 3.4 directly follows from Lemma 3.1, Lemma 3.2, and Lemma 3.3, which demonstrate that ϕVia(x; θ ) adheres to properties 1 through 3, as well as the fact that Shapley values provide the sole solution for assigning credit to players while satisfying the properties from 1 to 3 (Young, 1985; Lundberg & Lee, 2017). 3.2. Predictor Optimization The parameters of Via SHAP are optimized with the following dual objective: to learn an optimal function for producing the Shapley values of the predictions and to minimize the prediction loss with respect to the true target. Therefore, the prediction loss is minimized using a function suitable for the specific prediction task, e.g., binary cross-entropy for binary classification or mean squared error for regression tasks. The following presents the loss function for multinomial classification: h Via SHAP j (x S) Via SHAP j (0) 1 S ϕVia j (x; θ) 2i yjlog(ˆyj) . (7) where β is a predefined scaling hyperparameter and ˆyj is the predicted probability of class yj Y by Via SHAP. The optimization of Via SHAP is illustrated in Figure 2 and summarized in Algorithm 1. The global optimizer of loss function 7 is restricted to predict 0 if all features are marginalized out. However, this approach may not be suitable for all prediction tasks, e.g., regression problems. Therefore, we also propose a relaxed variant of the optimization problem 7, where a Via SHAP model predicts y = 1 ϕVia(x; θ) + δ (further details on this approach are provided in Appendix G). 3.3. Via SHAP Approximator According to the universal approximation theorem, a feedforward network with at least one hidden layer and sufficient units in the hidden layer can approximate any continuous function over a compact input set to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, given a suitable activation function (Hornik et al., 1989; Cybenko, 1989; Hornik, 1991). Consequently, neural networks and multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) can be employed to learn Via SHAP for prediction tasks where there is Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Apply the same set of samples Figure 2. The optimization of Via SHAP is conducted using a dual-objective loss function that aims to learn an optimal function for generating the Shapley values while minimizing the prediction loss. a continuous mapping function from the input dataset to the true targets, which also applies to the true Shapley values as a continuous function. (Liu et al., 2024) recently proposed Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (KAN), as an alternative approach to MLPs inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. According to the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, a multivariate continuous function on a bounded domain can be represented by a finite sum of compositions of continuous univariate functions (Kolmogorov, 1956; 1957; Liu et al., 2024), as follows: f(x) = f(x1, . . . , xn) = p=1 ψq,p(xp) , where ψq,p : [0, 1] R is a univariate function and Ψq : R R is a univariate continuous function. (Liu et al., 2024) defined a KAN layer as a matrix of onedimensional functions: Ψ = {ψq,p}, with p = 1, 2, . . . , nin and q = 1, 2, . . . , nout. Where nin and nout represent the dimensions of the layer s input and output, respectively, and ψq,p are learnable functions parameterized as splines. A KAN network is a composition of L layers stacked together; subsequently, the output of KAN on instance x is given by: y = KAN(x) = ΨL 1 ΨL 2 Ψ1 Ψ0(x). The degree of each spline and the number of splines for each function are both hyperparameters. 4. Empirical Investigation We evaluate both the predictive performance of Via SHAP and the feature importance attribution with respect to the true Shapley values. This section begins with outlining the experimental setup. Then, the predictive performance of Via SHAP is evaluated. Afterwards, we benchmark the similarity between the feature importance obtained by Via SHAP and the ground truth Shapley values. We also evaluate the predictive performance and the accuracy of Shapley values on image data. Finally, we summarize the findings of the ablation study. Algorithm 1 VIASHAP Data: training data X, labels Y , scalar β Result: model parameters θ Initialize V : Via SHAP(ϕVia(x; θ)) while not converged do L 0 for each x X and y Y do sample S p(S) ˆy V(x) Lpred prediction loss(ˆy, y) Lϕ Vy(x S) Vy(0) 1 S ϕVia y (x; θ) 2 L + Lpred + β Lϕ end Compute gradients θL Update θ θ θL end 4.1. Experimental Setup We employ 25 publicly available datasets in the experiments, each divided into training, validation, and test subsets 1. The training set is used to train the model, the validation set is 1The details of the datasets are available in Table 19 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression used to detect overfitting and determine early stopping, and the test set is used to evaluate the model s performance. All the learning algorithms are trained using default settings without hyperparameter tuning. The training and validation sets are combined into a single training set for algorithms that do not utilize a validation set for performance tracking. During data preprocessing, categorical feature categories are tokenized with numbers starting from one, reserving zero for missing values. We use standard normalization so the feature values are centered around 0. Via SHAP can be trained using the baseline removal approach or marginal expectations as a value function. However, the baseline removal approach is adopted as the default value function2. We experimented with four different implementations of Via SHAP, using Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (KANs) and feedforward neural networks3: 1KANVia: Based on the method proposed by Liu et al. (2024) using a computationally efficient implementation4. Uses spline basis functions and consists of an input layer, two hidden layers, and an output layer. Layer dimensions: Input layer maps n features to 64 dimensions, the first hidden layer to 128 dimensions, the second hidden layer to 64 dimensions, and the output layer to n (number of classes). 2KANVia ϱ : Replaces the spline basis in the original KANs with Radial Basis Functions (RBFs)5. The architecture matches that of KANVia. 3MLPVia: A multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with identical input and output dimensions per layer as the KAN-based implementations. Incorporates batch normalization after each layer and uses Re LU activation functions. 4MLPVia θ : Similar to MLPVia, but the number of units in the hidden layers is raised to match the total number of parameters in the KANVia models, as KANVia always results in models with a greater number of parameters compared to the remaining implementations. The four implementations were trained with the β of (7) set to 10 and used 32 sampled coalitions per instance. The above hyperparameters were determined in a quasi-random manner. For the evaluation of the predictive performance, the four Via SHAP approximators (KANVia, KANVia ϱ , MLPVia, and MLPVia θ ) are compared against XGBoost, Random Forests, and Tab Net (Arik & Pfister, 2021). All the compared algorithms are trained using the default hyperparameters set- 2Further details regarding the marginal expectations approach are provided in Appendix H. 3The source code is available here: https://github. com/amrmalkhatib/Via SHAP 4https://github.com/Blealtan/ efficient-kan 5https://github.com/Ziyao Li/fast-kan tings without tuning, as it has been shown by (Shwartz-Ziv & Armon, 2022) that deep models typically require more extensive tuning on each tabular dataset to match the performance of tree ensemble models, e.g., XGBoost. If the model s performance varies with different random seeds, it will be trained using five different seeds, and the average result will be reported alongside the standard deviation. In binary classification tasks with imbalanced training data, the minority class in the training subset is randomly oversampled to match the size of the majority class, a common strategy to address highly imbalanced data (Koziarski et al., 2017; Huang et al., 2022). On the other hand, no oversampling is applied to multinomial classification datasets. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) is used for measuring predictive performance since it is invariant to classification thresholds. For multinomial classification, we compute the AUC for each class versus the rest and then weighting it by the class support. If two algorithms achieve the same AUC score, the model with a smaller standard deviation across five repetitions with different random seeds is considered better. For the explainability evaluation, we generate ground truth Shapley values by running the unbiased Kernel SHAP (Covert & Lee, 2021) until convergence. It has been demonstrated that the unbiased Kernel SHAP will converge to the true Shapley values when given a sufficiently large number of data samples (Covert & Lee, 2021; Jethani et al., 2022).6 We measure the similarity of the approximated Shapley values by Via SHAP to the ground truth using cosine similarity, Spearman rank correlation (Spearman, 1904), and the coefficient of determination (R2), where cosine similarity measures the alignment between two explanation vectors, while Spearman rank correlation measures the consistency in feature rankings. The results are presented as mean values with standard deviations across all data instances in the test set. For image experiments, we use the CIFAR-10 dataset (Krizhevsky et al., 2014). We provide three Via SHAP implementations for image classification: Res Net50Via, Res Net18Via, and U-Net Via based on Res Net50, Res Net18 (He et al., 2016), and U-Net (Ronneberger et al., 2015), respectively. The accuracy of the Shapley values is estimated by measuring the effect of excluding and including the top important features on the prediction, similar to the approach followed by (Jethani et al., 2022). 4.2. Predictive Performance Evaluation We evaluated the performance of the seven algorithms (KANVia, KANVia ϱ , MLPVia, MLPVia θ , Tab Net, Random Forests, and XGBoost) across the 25 datasets, with detailed results presented in Table 1. The results show that 6https://github.com/iancovert/ shapley-regression Prediction via Shapley Value Regression KANVia obtains the highest average rank with respect to AUC. KANVia ϱ came in second place, closely followed by XGBoost, with only a slight difference between them. We employed the Friedman test (Friedman, 1939) to determine whether the observed performance differences are statistically significant. We tested the null hypothesis that there is no difference in predictive performance. The Friedman test allowed the rejection of the null hypothesis, indicating that there is indeed a difference in predictive performance, as measured by AUC, at the 0.05 significance level. Subsequently, the post-hoc Nemenyi (Nemenyi, 1963) test was applied to identify which pairwise differences are significant, again at the 0.05 significance level. The results of the post-hoc test, summarized in Figure 3, indicate that the differences between Via SHAP using KAN implementations and the tree ensemble models, i.e., XGBoost and Random Forests, are statistically insignificant, given the sample size of 25 datasets. However, the differences in predictive performance between KANVia and MLP variants (MLPVia and MLPVia θ ) are statistically significant. It is also noticeable that the MLP variants of Via SHAP underperform compared to all other competitors, even when the MLP models have an equivalent number of parameters to KANVia. We also evaluated the impact of incorporating Shapley loss on the predictive performance of a KAN model by comparing KANVia to an identical KAN classifier trained without the Shapley loss. The results show that KANVia significantly outperforms identical KAN architecture that is not optimized to compute Shapley values. The detailed results are available in Appendix I. Figure 3. The average rank of the 7 predictors on the 25 datasets with respect to the AUC (the lower rank is better). The critical difference (CD) is the largest statistically insignificant difference. 4.3. Explainability Evaluation The explainability of the various Via SHAP implementations is evaluated by measuring the similarity of Via SHAP s Shapley values (ϕVia(x; θ) to the ground truth Shapley values (ϕ), computed by the unbiased Kernel SHAP, as discussed in Subsection 4.1, taking Via SHAP as the black-box model. We present results for models trained with the default values for the hyperparameters. The effect of these settings are further investigated in the ablation study. The evaluation of the alignment between ϕVia(x; θ) and ϕ using cosine similarity generally shows a high degree of sim- Figure 4. The similarity between KANVia and Kernel SHAP s approximations. Kernel SHAP initially provides approximations that differ remarkably from the values of Via SHAP. However, as Kernel SHAP refines its approximations with more samples, the similarity to Via SHAP s values grows. ilarity between the generated Shapley values and the ground truth as illustrated in Figure 4. The ranking of the compared implementations of Via SHAP with respect to their cosine similarity to the ground truth Shapley values shows that MLPVia θ is ranked first, followed by KANVia, KANVia ϱ , and MLPVia, respectively. However, the Friedman test does not indicate any significant difference between the different implementations of Via SHAP. At the same time, the results of ranking the four implementations of Via SHAP based on their Spearman rank correlation with the ground truth Shapley values reveal that KANVia ranks first, followed by a tie for second place between KANVia ϱ and MLPVia θ , and MLPVia placing last. In order to find out whether the differences are significant, the Friedman test is applied once again, which allows for the rejection of the null hypothesis, indicating that there is indeed a difference between the compared models in their ϕVia(x; θ) correlations to the ground truth ϕ, at 0.05 significance level. The post-hoc Nemenyi test, at 0.05 level, indicates that differences between MLPVia and the remaining models are significant, as summarized in Figure 6. Overall, KANVia is found to be a relatively stable approximator across the 25 datasets when both similarity metrics (cosine similarity and Spearman rank correlation) are considered. Detailed results can be found in Tables 2 and 3 in Appendix E. We also compare the accuracy of the Shapley values generated by KANVia to those produced by Fast SHAP, with KANVia utilized as black-box within Fast SHAP. The results in Appendix K show that KANVia significantly outperforms Fast SHAP in terms of similarity to the ground truth. 4.4. Image Experiments We evaluated the predictive performance of Res Net50Via, Res Net18Via, and U-Net Via on the CIFAR-10 dataset. All models were trained from scratch (without transfer learning). The results, summarized in Table 4, demonstrate that Via SHAP can perform accurately in image classification tasks. We also compared the accuracy of the explanations Prediction via Shapley Value Regression obtained by Via SHAP implementations with those obtained by Fast SHAP (where Via SHAP models were treated as black boxes). The results in Table 5 and Figure 8 show that Via SHAP models consistently provides more accurate Shapley value approximations than the explanations obtained using Fast SHAP. Figure 5 provides two examples showing the explanations produced by Res Net18Via and Fast SHAP. The experiment details can be found in Appendix F. Res Net18Via Fast SHAP( Res Net18Via ) Figure 5. The explanations for the predicted class generated by Via SHAP and Fast SHAP using two randomly selected images from the CIFAR-10 dataset. 4.5. Ablation Study The ablation study was conducted after the empirical evaluation to ensure that no prior knowledge of the data or models influenced the experimental setup. The detailed results of the ablation study are provided in Appendex J. We began by examining the effect of β on both predictive performance and the accuracy of Shapley values. The results demonstrate that the predictive performance remains robust to changes in β, unless β is raised to an exceptionally large value, e.g., 200-fold. A more remarkable observation is that the accuracy of the computed Shapley values improves as β grows without sacrificing predictive performance. However, the model fails to learn properly with substantially large β. Afterwards, we evaluated the effect of the number of sampled coalitions. The results indicate that the number of samples has little impact on predictive performance and the accuracy of Shapley values, especially if compared to the impact of β. We also study the effect of a link function on both predictive performance and the accuracy of Shapley values of Via SHAP. The results show that removing the link function significantly improves the accuracy of the Shapley values while maintaining the high predictive performance. Then, we assessed the impact of the efficiency constraint. The results indicate that the efficiency constraint has no significant impact on the predictive performance or the accuracy of the explanations of Via SHAP. Finally, we examined the impact of β on the progression of training and validation loss during training. The results indicate that Via SHAP tends to require a longer time to converge as β values increase. 5. Related Work In addition to Kernel SHAP and the real-time method Fast SHAP, alternative approaches have been proposed to reduce the time required for Shapley value approximation. Methods that exploit specific properties of the explained model can provide faster computations, e.g., Tree SHAP (Lundberg et al., 2020) and DASP (Ancona et al., 2019), while others limit the scope to specific problems, e.g., image classifications or text classification (Chen et al., 2019; Teneggi et al., 2022). Additionally, directions to improve Shapley value approximation by enhancing data sampling have also been explored (Frye et al., 2021; Aas et al., 2021; Covert et al., 2021; Mitchell et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2023a; Kolpaczki et al., 2024). Nevertheless, traditional methods for computing Shapley values have typically been considered post-hoc solutions for explaining predictions, requiring additional time, data, and resources to generate explanations. In contrast, Via SHAP computes Shapley values during inference, eliminating the need for a separate post-hoc explainer. Research on generating explanations using pre-trained models has explored several approaches. (Chen et al., 2018), (Yoon et al., 2019), and (Jethani et al., 2021) trained models for important features selection. (Schwab & Karlen, 2019) trained a model to estimate the influence of different inputs on the predicted outcome. (Situ et al., 2021) proposed to distill any explanation algorithm for text classification. Pretrained explainers, similar to other post-hoc methods, require further resources for training, and the fidelity of their explanations to the underlying black-box model can vary. Many approaches for creating explainable neural networks have been proposed. Such approaches not only generate predictions but also include an integrated component that provides explanations, which is trained alongside the predictor (Lei et al., 2016; Alvarez Melis & Jaakkola, 2018; Guo et al., 2021; Al-Shedivat et al., 2022; Sawada & Nakamura, 2022; Guyomard et al., 2022). Explainable graph neural networks (GNNs) have also been studied for graph-structured data, which typically exploit the internal properties of their models to generate explanations, e.g., the similarity between nodes (Dai & Wang, 2021), finding patterns and common graph structures(Feng et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Cui et al., 2022), or analyzing the behavior of different components of the GNN (Xuanyuan et al., 2023). GNNs have also been employed to learn explainable models for data types beyond graphs, e.g., tabular data (Alkhatib et al., 2024; Alkhatib & Bostr om, 2025) and images (Chaidos et al., 2025). However, explanations generated by explainable neural networks do not always correspond to Shapley values, in contrast to Via SHAP. Moreover, the explanations lack fidelity guarantees and do not elaborate on how exactly the predictions are computed, whereas Via SHAP generates predictions directly from their Shapley values. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression 6. Concluding Remarks We have proposed Via SHAP, an algorithm that computes Shapley values during inference. We evaluated the performance of Via SHAP using implementations based on the universal approximation theorem and the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. We have presented results from a large-scale empirical investigation, in which Via SHAP was evaluated with respect to predictive performance and the accuracy of the computed Shapley values. Via SHAP using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks showed superior predictive performance compared to multi-layer perceptron variants while competing favorably with state-of-the-art algorithms for tabular data XGBoost and Random Forests. Via SHAP estimations showed a high similarity to the ground truth Shapley values, which can be controlled through the hyperparameters. One natural direction for future research is to implement Via SHAP using state-of-the-art algorithms. Another direction is to use Via SHAP to study possible adversarial attacks on a predictive model. Acknowledgements This work was partially supported by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The computations (on GPUs) were enabled by resources provided by the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS), partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2022-06725. Impact Statement This paper presents work whose goal is to advance the field of Explainable Machine Learning. The proposed method could be deployed across a variety of domains where interpretability is crucial. Unlike traditional explanation methods that add latency and can be harder to scale, our approach provides explainable models that are not restricted by a specific design. Furthermore, improvements in explanation accuracy could enhance users trust and understanding of the employed model. The availability of accurate real-time explanations through one model alongside predictions could also enable its use in resource-constrained settings. However, there are also potential risks, for example, accessible and fast explanations could lead to superficial trust in model predictions, specifically if the explanations are misinterpreted. 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Protgnn: Towards self-explaining graph neural networks. In AAAI, 2022. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression A. Proof of Lemma 3.1 By definition of Via SHAP: Via SHAP(x) = 1 ϕVia(x; θ) = X i N ϕVia i (x; θ) This is the definition of local accuracy for the game v : S 7 Via SHAP(x S). B. Proof of Lemma 3.2 Assume that the global minimizer ϕVia(x; θ ) of the loss function (6) does not satisfy the missingness property, i.e., there exists a feature i that has no impact on the prediction: Via SHAP(x S {i}) = Via SHAP(x S), S N \ {i} (8) However, the Shapley value ϕi assigned by ϕVia(x; θ ) is not zero (ϕi = 0). We recall the optimized loss function: h Via SHAP(x S) Via SHAP(0) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) 2i , This loss is non-negative, and is thus minimized for a value of 0, implying all terms in the expectancy are equal to 0. In particular, for any set S N \ {i}, we have: ( Via SHAP(x S {i}) Via SHAP(0) 1 S {i}ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S) Via SHAP(0) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S {i}) 1 S {i}ϕVia(x; θ) = Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S) 1 S {i}ϕVia(x; θ) = Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) j S {i} ϕVia j (x; θ ) = X j S ϕVia j (x; θ ) ϕVia i (x; θ ) = 0 In practice, it is unlikely for a loss to exactly reach its global optimum. Instead, it approximates it. We assume here that the loss has reached a value ϵ2 for an ϵ 0. We propose an upper bound on ϕVia i (x; θ) conditioned on ϵ. Since the loss is composed only of non-negative terms, this means that: S N, Via SHAP(x S) Via SHAP(0) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) 2 ϵ2 Via SHAP(x S) Via SHAP(0) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) ϵ Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Via SHAP(x S {i}) Via SHAP(0) 1 S {i}ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S) Via SHAP(0) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S {i}) Via SHAP(0) 1 S {i}ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S) + Via SHAP(0) + 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) 2ϵ Via SHAP(x S) 1 S {i}ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S) + 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) 2ϵ by (8) j S {i} ϕVia j (x; θ) X j S ϕVia j (x; θ) 2ϵ ϕVia i (x; θ) 2ϵ ϕVia i (x; θ) 2Lϕ(θ) Thus, as the loss function converges to 0, so does the importance attributed to features with no influence on the outcome. C. Proof of Lemma 3.3 Since both V and V optimize their respective targets, they satisfy efficiency, i.e.: S N, V(x S) = 1 S ϕVia(x; θ ); V (x S) = 1 S ϕ Via(x; θ ) (9) V(x S {i}) V(x S) V (x S {i}) V (x S) j S {i} ϕVia j (x; θ ) X j S ϕVia j (x; θ ) X j S {i} ϕVia j (x; θ ) X j S ϕVia j (x; θ ) ϕVia i (x; θ ) ϕVia i (x; θ ) In the same way as for the Lemma 2, the proof assumes perfect minimization of the loss. Thus, we propose a relaxed variant, where the loss term Lϕ(θ) was minimized down to ϵ2 with ϵ 0. Thus, following similar reasoning as in the proof of Lemma 2, we have that S: Via SHAP(x S) Via SHAP(0) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) ϵ We also have: Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) = Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(0) + Via SHAP(0) By the triangle inequality on the right-hand side: Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(0) + Via SHAP(0) But observe that all features in 0 are non-contributive since, S N, 0S = 0 by definition of the masking operation. Thus, by the bound found in Lemma 2: i N, ϕi(0, θ) 2ϵ. Thus Via SHAP(0) 2nϵ. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) Via SHAP(0) + Via SHAP(0) ϵ + 2nϵ and we thus derive the following upper bound on the ϕi-wise error as: Via SHAP(x S) 1 S ϕVia(x; θ) ϵ(2n + 1). D. Predictive Performance We evaluated the performance of the four variants of Via SHAP implementations mentioned in the experimental setup, i.e., KANVia, KANVia ϱ , MLPVia, and MLPVia θ , are compared to the following algorithms for structured data: Random Forests, XGBoost, and Tab Net, where Random Forests and XGBoost result in black-box models, while Tab Net is explainable by visualizing feature selection masks that highlight important features. The predictive performance evaluation is conducted using 25 datasets. The results show that KANVia comes in first place as the best-performing classifier, followed by XGBoost and KANVia ϱ , based on AUC values. The Friedman test confirmed that the differences in predictive performance are statistically significant at the 0.05 level. A subsequent post-hoc Nemenyi test revealed that while the differences between KAN-based implementations and tree ensemble models (XGBoost and Random Forests) are statistically insignificant, the performance differences between KANVia and MLP variants are significant. Moreover, the differences between KANVia and Tab Net are also statistically significant. The ranking of the seven models on the 25 datasets and the results of the post-hoc Nemenyi test are illustrated in Figure 3. The detailed results on the 25 datasets are shown in Table 1. While the MLP implementations of Via SHAP significantly underperformed compared to the KAN variants, their performance can still be enhanced by using, for instance, deeper and more expressive models, particularly for datasets with high dimensionality and large training sets. However, we defer the task of improving MLP-based Via SHAP implementations to future work, as the core concept of Via SHAP can be integrated with any deep learning model. More importantly, Via SHAP is not limited to structured data and can be incorporated easily into the training loop of models in computer vision and natural language processing. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 1. The AUC of KANVia, KANVia ϱ , MLPVia, and MLPVia θ , Tab Net, Random Forests, and XGBoost. The best-performing model is colored in light green , and the second best-performing is colored in light blue . Dataset KANVia KANVia ϱ MLPVia MLPVia θ Tab Net Random Forests XGBoost Abalone 0.87 0.003 0.871 0.003 0.877 0.003 0.878 0.004 0.873 0.01 0.875 0.001 0.868 Ada Prior 0.89 0.005 0.899 0.002 0.887 0.005 0.878 0.005 0.82 0.062 0.885 0.001 0.887 Adult 0.914 0.003 0.916 0.001 0.91 0.007 0.912 0.006 0.911 0.001 0.913 0.001 0.928 Bank32nh 0.878 0.001 0.876 0.005 0.873 0.002 0.872 0.005 0.862 0.005 0.875 0.003 0.875 Electricity 0.93 0.004 0.92 0.004 0.864 0.003 0.87 0.008 0.88 0.009 0.97 0.0004 0.973 Elevators 0.935 0.002 0.939 0.001 0.922 0.031 0.938 0.003 0.942 0.002 0.909 0.001 0.935 Fars 0.96 0.0003 0.955 0.003 0.953 0.001 0.952 0.002 0.953 0.0008 0.951 0.0003 0.963 Helena 0.884 0.0001 0.881 0.0005 0.88 0.002 0.881 0.002 0.883 0.002 0.855 0.001 0.874 Heloc 0.788 0.002 0.784 0.002 0.775 0.006 0.773 0.004 0.774 0.007 0.779 0.001 0.767 Higgs 0.801 0.001 0.805 0.003 0.786 0.006 0.786 0.005 0.801 0.003 0.79 0.001 0.799 LHC Identify Jet 0.944 0.0001 0.942 0.0003 0.931 0.001 0.932 0.002 0.942 0.0008 0.935 0.0002 0.941 House 16H 0.949 0.0007 0.944 0.001 0.929 0.005 0.932 0.01 0.94 0.003 0.955 0.0004 0.952 Indian Pines 0.985 0.0004 0.885 0.086 0.918 0.014 0.692 0.191 0.983 0.003 0.979 0.0005 0.987 Jannis 0.864 0.001 0.861 0.0005 0.571 0.159 0.569 0.151 0.864 0.003 0.861 0.0002 0.871 JM1 0.732 0.003 0.74 0.006 0.719 0.01 0.717 0.005 0.726 0.004 0.746 0.004 0.708 Magic Telescope 0.929 0.001 0.927 0.001 0.917 0.004 0.917 0.004 0.929 0.001 0.933 0.0005 0.935 MC1 0.94 0.003 0.93 0.013 0.909 0.014 0.896 0.01 0.916 0.021 0.845 0.002 0.934 Microaggregation2 0.783 0.002 0.765 0.003 0.746 0.005 0.733 0.029 0.759 0.014 0.768 0.0008 0.781 Mozilla4 0.968 0.0008 0.962 0.001 0.948 0.002 0.947 0.001 0.96 0.004 0.988 0.0007 0.989 Satellite 0.996 0.001 0.992 0.002 0.997 0.001 0.996 0.001 0.991 0.002 0.998 0.0004 0.992 PC2 0.827 0.009 0.818 0.032 0.685 0.088 0.662 0.016 0.631 0.16 0.631 0.05 0.646 Phonemes 0.946 0.003 0.936 0.004 0.904 0.004 0.894 0.032 0.918 0.014 0.965 0.002 0.951 Pollen 0.515 0.006 0.496 0.007 0.504 0.007 0.5 0.014 0.493 0.012 0.485 0.006 0.475 Telco Customer Churn 0.854 0.003 0.852 0.003 0.843 0.003 0.839 0.004 0.832 0.004 0.847 0.002 0.846 1st order theorem proving 0.822 0.002 0.695 0.024 0.737 0.013 0.64 0.093 0.727 0.01 0.855 0.001 0.858 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression E. Explanations Accuracy Evaluation The explainability of the four implementations of Via SHAP, based on MLP and KAN, were evaluated by comparing their Shapley values (ϕVia(x; θ)) to the ground truth Shapley values (ϕ). As mentioned in the experimental set, the ground truth Shapley values were generated by Kernel SHAP after convergence on each example in the test set. In the explainability evaluation, we used the models trained with default hyperparameters in the predictive performance evaluation, which generally showed high similarity to the ground truth, as demonstrated by the cosine similarity measurements. The Friedman test found no significant differences in the cosine similarity between the compared algorithms over the 25 datasets. The detailed results are available in Table 2. Table 2. The cosine similarity of the ground truth Shapley values to the Shapley values obtained from KANVia, KANVia ϱ , MLPVia, and MLPVia θ . The best-performing model is colored in light green . Dataset KANVia KANVia ϱ MLPVia MLPVia θ Abalone 0.969 0.0166 0.966 0.013 0.647 0.21 0.807 0.214 Ada Prior 0.935 0.046 0.982 0.006 0.663 0.142 0.908 0.045 Adult 0.931 0.049 0.992 0.011 0.574 0.16 0.947 0.032 Bank32nh 0.779 0.163 0.713 0.187 0.794 0.166 0.876 0.084 Electricity 0.970 0.02 0.971 0.017 0.912 0.131 0.913 0.09 Elevators 0.966 0.024 0.966 0.026 0.976 0.025 0.976 0.02 Fars 0.886 0.253 0.886 0.28 0.95 0.104 0.943 0.058 Helena 0.856 0.092 0.715 0.157 0.840 0.099 0.789 0.104 Heloc 0.844 0.111 0.671 0.182 0.759 0.176 0.832 0.125 Higgs 0.917 0.068 0.925 0.062 0.92 0.093 0.912 0.097 LHC Identify Jet 0.971 0.021 0.952 0.065 0.97 0.042 0.972 0.041 House 16H 0.919 0.048 0.922 0.043 0.927 0.06 0.944 0.048 Indian Pines 0.796 0.121 0.241 0.07 0.304 0.077 0.325 0.084 Jannis 0.852 0.141 0.546 0.189 0.675 0.13 0.439 0.164 JM1 0.88 0.044 0.667 0.217 0.795 0.203 0.839 0.159 Magic Telescope 0.922 0.067 0.935 0.058 0.973 0.035 0.962 0.058 MC1 0.466 0.268 0.794 0.084 0.777 0.127 0.887 0.055 Microaggregation2 0.938 0.049 0.610 0.149 0.840 0.099 0.81 0.096 Mozilla4 0.953 0.023 0.948 0.016 0.975 0.018 0.979 0.022 Satellite 0.841 0.116 0.870 0.077 0.766 0.159 0.861 0.093 PC2 0.534 0.183 0.905 0.053 0.786 0.137 0.827 0.098 Phonemes 0.811 0.162 0.868 0.082 0.873 0.126 0.916 0.083 Pollen 0.952 0.059 0.945 0.023 0.464 0.476 0.592 0.439 Telco Customer Churn 0.81 0.108 0.904 0.051 0.43 0.189 0.592 0.231 1st order theorem proving 0.725 0.179 0.464 0.517 0.387 0.182 0.539 0.144 We also measured similarity in ranking the important features between the computed Shapley values (ϕVia(x; θ)) and the ground truth Shapley values (ϕ) using the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. KANVia is ranked first with respect to the correlation values across the 25 datasets, followed by both KANViaϱ and MLPViaθ in the second place, and MLPVia in the last place. The Spearman rank test revealed that the observed differences are significant. Subsequently, the post-hoc Nemenyi test confirmed that MLPVia significantly underperformed the compared algorithms, while the differences between the remaining algorithms are insignificant. Overall, if both the cosine similarity and the Spearman rank are considered, KANVia proved to be a more stable approximator, as detailed in Tables 2 and 3. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 6. The average rank of KANVia, KANVia ϱ , MLPVia, and MLPVia θ on the 25 datasets with respect to the Spearman correlation between the ground truth Shapley values and the values obtained from the compared models. A lower rank is better and the critical difference (CD) represents the largest difference that is not statistically significant. Table 3. The Spearman rank correlation between the ground truth Shapley values and the Shapley values obtained from KANVia, KANVia ϱ , and MLPVia. The best-performing model is colored in light green . Dataset KANVia KANVia ϱ MLPVia MLPVia θ Abalone 0.663 0.234 0.879 0.14 0.529 0.246 0.649 0.236 Ada Prior 0.876 0.088 0.962 0.025 0.576 0.163 0.869 0.081 Adult 0.959 0.035 0.932 0.034 0.398 0.214 0.864 0.084 Bank32nh 0.432 0.151 0.433 0.139 0.349 0.15 0.486 0.129 Electricity 0.798 0.183 0.838 0.142 0.751 0.206 0.848 0.137 Elevators 0.920 0.064 0.888 0.072 0.883 0.07 0.902 0.06 Fars 0.347 0.328 0.106 0.133 0.512 0.164 0.491 0.115 Helena 0.669 0.152 0.475 0.188 0.656 0.159 0.660 0.168 Heloc 0.741 0.147 0.673 0.159 0.589 0.173 0.701 0.143 Higgs 0.674 0.12 0.718 0.112 0.535 0.143 0.568 0.139 LHC Identify Jet 0.857 0.119 0.726 0.184 0.737 0.164 0.724 0.146 House 16H 0.888 0.092 0.858 0.102 0.823 0.112 0.864 0.095 Indian Pines 0.699 0.116 0.057 0.054 0.099 0.07 0.181 0.056 Jannis 0.477 0.131 0.314 0.174 0.343 0.132 0.227 0.137 JM1 0.756 0.202 0.682 0.223 0.59 0.188 0.715 0.189 Magic Telescope 0.9 0.098 0.91 0.087 0.882 0.098 0.828 0.141 MC1 0.621 0.157 0.885 0.088 0.619 0.169 0.716 0.108 Microaggregation2 0.876 0.096 0.411 0.183 0.656 0.159 0.705 0.2 Mozilla4 0.942 0.092 0.971 0.063 0.909 0.161 0.913 0.137 Satellite 0.746 0.212 0.786 0.151 0.677 0.208 0.8 0.132 PC2 0.733 0.161 0.924 0.09 0.675 0.154 0.737 0.135 Phonemes 0.941 0.103 0.954 0.083 0.807 0.213 0.862 0.159 Pollen 0.285 0.442 0.171 0.484 0.297 0.498 0.407 0.545 Telco Customer Churn 0.848 0.098 0.938 0.043 0.262 0.297 0.471 0.211 1st order theorem proving 0.623 0.188 0.082 0.145 0.183 0.146 0.367 0.14 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression F. Image Experiments We implemented Via SHAP for image classification using three architectures: Res Net50 (He et al., 2016) (Res Net50Via), Res Net18 (Res Net18Via), and U-Net (Ronneberger et al., 2015) (U-Net Via). The predictive performance of these models was evaluated using Top-1 Accuracy, with the results summarized in Table 4. All models were trained on the CIFAR-10 (Krizhevsky et al., 2014) dataset without transfer learning or pre-trained weights (i.e., trained from scratch) using four masks (samples) per data instance. The training incorporated early stopping, terminating after ten epochs without improvement on a validation split (10% of the training data). The results of evaluating the performance of the trained models on the test set demonstrate that Via SHAP can achieve high predictive performance on standard image classification tasks. Table 4. A comparison of the predictive performance of Res Net50Via, Res Net18Via, and U-Net Via measured in AUC. AUC 0.95 Confidence Interval U-Net Via 0.983 (0.981, 0.986) Res Net18Via 0.968 (0.964, 0.971) Res Net50Via 0.96 (0.956, 0.964) In order to assess the accuracy of the Shapley values computed by Via SHAP implementations, we followed a methodology similar to (Jethani et al., 2022). Specifically, we selected the top 50% most important features identified by the explainer and evaluated the predictive performance of the explained model under two conditions: using only the selected top features (Inclusion Accuracy) and excluding the top features (Exclusion Accuracy). We compared the accuracy of Shapley value approximations of the three models (Res Net50Via, Res Net18Via, and U-Net Via). We also evaluated the accuracy of Fast SHAP s approximations where the three Via SHAP implementations for image classification are provided as black boxes to Fast SHAP. The results indicate that the Via SHAP implementations consistently provide more accurate Shapley value approximations than those generated by Fast SHAP, as shown in Table 5. Figure 7 presents two examples illustrating the explanations generated by Via SHAP models and Fast SHAP, where the latter treats the Via SHAP models as black-box predictors. We also show the effects of using different percentages of the top features considered for inclusion and exclusion on the top-1 accuracy in Figure 8. Table 5. The accuracy of the Shapley values is evaluated using the top 50% of the most important features (according to their Shapley values). The Inclusion AUC (higher values are better) and the Exclusion AUC (lower values are better) are computed using the top 1 accuracy. Dataset Exclusion AUC 0.95 Confidence Interval Inclusion AUC 0.95 Confidence Interval U-Net Via 0.773 (0.747, 0.799) 0.988 (0.981, 0.995) Fast SHAP(U-Net Via) 0.864 (0.843, 0.885) 0.978 (0.969, 0.987) Res Net18Via 0.611 (0.581, 0.642) 0.99 (0.983, 0.996) Fast SHAP(Res Net18Via) 0.755 (0.728, 0.782) 0.954 (0.941, 0.967) Res Net50Via 0.554 (0.523, 0.585) 0.997 (0.994, 1.0) Fast SHAP(Res Net50Via) 0.778 (0.753, 0.804) 0.978 (0.969, 0.987) Res Net18Via Fast SHAP( Res Net18Via ) Res Net50Via Fast SHAP( Res Net50Via ) Fast SHAP( U-Net Via ) Figure 7. The explanations generated by Via SHAP models and Fast SHAP using two randomly selected images from the CIFAR-10 dataset. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression 0 20 40 60 80 100 Exclusion % Top 1 Accuracy Exclusion Curve 0 20 40 60 80 100 Inclusion % Top 1 Accuracy Inclusion Curve Res Net18 Fast SHAP(Res Net18) Res Net50 Fast SHAP(Res Net50) U-Net Fast SHAP(U-Net) Figure 8. The inclusion and exclusion curves of Via SHAP implementations as well as their Fast SHAP explainers. We show how the top-1 accuracy of the predictive model changes as we exclude or include an increasing share of the important features, where the important features are determined by each explainer in the comparison. Figure 9. The explanations of Res Net18Via for 10 randomly selected predictions on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Each column corresponds to a CIFAR-10 class, and the predicted probability by Res Net18Via displayed beneath each image. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression G. Relaxed Expected Prediction Via SHAP is optimized to minimize the loss function (7) and predict 0 if all features are marginalized out (Via SHAP(0) = 0), which can be a limitation if the baseline removal approach (Sundararajan & Najmi, 2020), for instance, is applied to mask features using their mean values, i.e., Via SHAP(E(x)) = 0. In some cases, particularly with heavily imbalanced data, the average values E(x) might strongly represent one class over others. Moreover, in regression problems, the prediction of an accurate estimator using the expected values is unlikely to be 0. Therefore, we propose a relaxed variant of the optimization problem, where Via SHAP(0) is not obliged to predict 0 in order to minimize the Shapley loss. We introduce a bias term δ to Via SHAP, modifying the predictions such that y = 1 ϕVia(x; θ) + δ. Accordingly, the relaxed loss function is formulated as follows: h (1 ϕVia(x S; θ) + δ) (1 ϕVia(0; θ) + δ) 1 S ϕVia j (x; θ) 2i yjlog(1 ϕVia j (x; θ) + δ) , (10) Consequently, Via SHAP explains Via SHAP(x) δ, where δ is optimized through the prediction loss function to minimize the overall prediction error. In the case of baseline removal using the expected values, Via SHAP(E(x)) δ. To measure the effect of the relaxed loss function on the predictive performance as well as the accuracy of the Shapley value approximations, we conduct an experiment where we compare the performance of two identical KAN implementations: one trained with the default loss function (7) and the other trained with the relaxed variant of the loss function (10). The two implementations are trained using the default setting without a link function applied to the predicted outcome. The detailed results of predictive performance are presented in Table 6, while the accuracy of the Shapley value approximations is provided in Table 7. We test the null hypothesis that no significant difference exists in predictive performance, as measured by AUC, between Via SHAP trained using the default architecture and its relaxed variant. Given that only two approaches are compared, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (Wilcoxon, 1945) is employed. The results indicate that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the 0.05 significance level, i.e., there is no significant difference in the predictive performance of the compared approaches. Although the datasets used in the experiments include 19 imbalanced datasets, the results of both variants of Via SHAP are performing remarkably well. The results regarding the similarity of the approximated Shapley values to the ground truth show no significant difference between the compared approaches, as measured by the three similarity metrics: cosine similarity, Spearman s rank, and R2. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 6. The predictive performance of KANVia optimized for Via SHAP(0) = 0 vs. the relaxed version of the optimization function (Via SHAP(0) = δ). The predictive performance is measured by AUC. The best-performing model is colored in light green . Dataset KANVia (Via SHAP(0) = 0) KANVia (Via SHAP(0) = δ) Abalone 0.883 0.0002 0.883 0.0002 Ada Prior 0.898 0.003 0.900 0.003 Adult 0.919 0.0005 0.919 0.003 Bank32nh 0.883 0.003 0.887 0.002 Electricity 0.934 0.004 0.936 0.006 Elevators 0.936 0.003 0.937 0.001 Fars 0.958 0.002 0.958 0.001 Helena 0.868 0.006 0.873 0.003 Heloc 0.792 0.001 0.793 0.001 Higgs 0.801 0.001 0.801 0.001 LHC Identify Jet 0.939 0.0005 0.938 0.003 House 16H 0.949 0.001 0.951 0.001 Indian Pines 0.982 0.001 0.981 0.002 Jannis 0.861 0.001 0.858 0.003 JM1 0.686 0.025 0.703 0.025 Magic Telescope 0.921 0.002 0.925 0.002 MC1 0.952 0.011 0.942 0.013 Microaggregation2 0.764 0.008 0.766 0.011 Mozilla4 0.965 0.001 0.965 0.001 Satellite 0.944 0.010 0.964 0.022 PC2 0.659 0.060 0.689 0.031 Phonemes 0.923 0.003 0.922 0.002 Pollen 0.501 0.002 0.502 0.004 Telco Customer Churn 0.857 0.003 0.852 0.006 1st order theorem proving 0.810 0.006 0.761 0.003 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 7. A comparison to evaluate the similarity to the ground truth explanations between KANVia optimized for Via SHAP(0) = 0 and the relaxed version of the optimization function (Via SHAP(0) = δ). The similarity is measured using cosine similarity, Spearman s rank, and R2. The best-performing model is colored in light green. Cosine Similarity Spearman s Rank R2 Dataset Via SHAP(0) = 0 Via SHAP(0) = δ Via SHAP(0) = 0 Via SHAP(0) = δ Via SHAP(0) = 0 Via SHAP(0) = δ Abalone 0.999 0.0008 0.999 0.001 0.971 0.052 0.972 0.054 0.999 0.002 0.998 0.003 Ada Prior 0.963 0.037 0.945 0.053 0.909 0.068 0.886 0.088 0.9 0.095 0.858 0.132 Adult 0.981 0.03 0.984 0.023 0.931 0.074 0.941 0.056 0.948 0.079 0.956 0.066 Bank32nh 0.948 0.045 0.948 0.043 0.648 0.114 0.646 0.113 0.87 0.142 0.874 0.126 Electricity 0.998 0.004 0.997 0.005 0.967 0.043 0.965 0.043 0.992 0.012 0.992 0.016 Elevators 0.997 0.004 0.995 0.006 0.969 0.026 0.963 0.031 0.993 0.009 0.988 0.016 Fars 0.962 0.036 0.995 0.012 0.882 0.073 0.724 0.119 0.895 0.073 0.988 0.029 Helena 0.874 0.095 0.873 0.101 0.702 0.148 0.701 0.143 0.677 0.204 0.689 0.197 Heloc 0.962 0.036 0.973 0.029 0.882 0.073 0.885 0.078 0.895 0.105 0.934 0.065 Higgs 0.991 0.006 0.989 0.01 0.87 0.057 0.833 0.076 0.977 0.014 0.974 0.023 LHC Identify Jet 0.999 0.002 0.999 0.005 0.974 0.032 0.961 0.047 0.998 0.005 0.997 0.012 House 16H 0.988 0.015 0.987 0.018 0.952 0.044 0.948 0.051 0.961 0.057 0.965 0.04 Indian Pines 0.683 0.171 0.648 0.147 0.553 0.18 0.511 0.163 0.333 0.192 0.266 0.205 Jannis 0.898 0.072 0.884 0.086 0.624 0.113 0.607 0.125 0.722 0.183 0.717 0.186 JM1 0.965 0.042 0.965 0.029 0.916 0.085 0.917 0.077 0.901 0.094 0.907 0.09 Magic Telescope 0.994 0.006 0.997 0.004 0.959 0.042 0.968 0.039 0.98 0.02 0.991 0.012 MC1 0.951 0.093 0.957 0.089 0.881 0.139 0.891 0.121 0.873 0.332 0.894 0.236 Microaggregation2 0.982 0.021 0.985 0.021 0.957 0.049 0.959 0.056 0.929 0.114 0.956 0.057 Mozilla4 0.9998 0.0003 0.9998 0.0005 0.967 0.074 0.968 0.071 0.9996 0.0007 0.9995 0.001 Satellite 0.976 0.033 0.961 0.052 0.894 0.102 0.856 0.131 0.814 0.296 0.83 0.203 PC2 0.956 0.087 0.945 0.096 0.875 0.127 0.857 0.133 0.895 0.223 0.853 0.606 Phonemes 0.993 0.013 0.996 0.005 0.951 0.094 0.972 0.058 0.975 0.076 0.987 0.022 Pollen 0.994 0.013 0.988 0.02 0.959 0.076 0.933 0.11 0.929 0.212 0.86 0.913 Telco Customer Churn 0.978 0.025 0.973 0.027 0.934 0.052 0.913 0.068 0.939 0.054 0.93 0.06 1st order theorem proving 0.778 0.123 0.814 0.131 0.66 0.146 0.771 0.142 0.429 0.479 0.612 0.239 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression H. Via SHAP with Marginal Expectations We evaluate the predictive performance and the similarity of the approximate Shapley values to the ground truth values when Via SHAP is trained using marginal expectations (Chen et al., 2020) as the strategy for marginalizing out features Via SHAP(x S) = E x S h 1 ϕVia(x S, XN\S; θ) i . In the experiment, we compare Via SHAP trained using baseline removal vs. marginal expectations. The compared models are trained using the default settings of Via SHAP without link functions. The marginal expectations models employ 128 data instances as background data selected from the validation set. The results of the experiment, presented in Tables 8 and 9, indicate that Via SHAP trained using the marginal expectations value function significantly underperforms the baseline removal approach. Furthermore, Via SHAP trained with marginal expectations fails to accurately approximate the solutions provided by the unbiased Kernel SHAP that employs marginal expectations. The results indicate that employing the marginal expectations value function can hinder the learning of an accurate predictor. Table 8. The predictive performance of KANVia optimized using marginal expectations for masking features vs. using baseline removal. The predictive performance is measured by AUC. The best-performing model is colored in light green . Dataset Marginal Expectations Baseline Removal Abalone 0.860 0.005 0.883 0.0002 Ada Prior 0.833 0.010 0.898 0.003 Adult 0.888 0.004 0.919 0.000 Bank32nh 0.833 0.007 0.883 0.003 Elevators 0.875 0.006 0.936 0.003 Helena 0.850 0.003 0.868 0.006 House 16H 0.929 0.003 0.949 0.001 Indian Pines 0.939 0.039 0.982 0.001 JM1 0.711 0.009 0.686 0.025 MC1 0.936 0.019 0.952 0.011 Microaggregation2 0.758 0.017 0.764 0.008 Mozilla4 0.924 0.006 0.965 0.001 Phonemes 0.907 0.006 0.923 0.003 Telco Customer Churn 0.824 0.010 0.857 0.003 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 9. The similarity to the ground truth explanations when KANVia optimized using marginal expectations for masking features vs. using baseline removal. The similarity is measured using cosine similarity, Spearman s rank, and R2. The best-performing model is colored in light green. Cosine Similarity Spearman s Rank R2 Dataset Marginal Baseline Marginal Baseline Marginal Baseline Abalone 0.104 0.629 0.999 0.001 0.697 0.253 0.971 0.052 -14.28 13.19 0.999 0.002 Ada Prior 0.331 0.286 0.963 0.037 0.526 0.223 0.909 0.068 -0.87 1.071 0.9 0.095 Adult 0.448 0.375 0.981 0.03 0.665 0.176 0.931 0.074 -0.778 1.261 0.948 0.079 Bank32nh 0.811 0.116 0.948 0.045 0.426 0.143 0.648 0.114 0.544 0.301 0.87 0.142 Elevators 0.497 0.362 0.997 0.004 0.559 0.224 0.969 0.026 -1.498 1.427 0.993 0.009 Helena 0.286 0.149 0.874 0.095 -0.013 0.187 0.702 0.148 -0.221 0.533 0.677 0.204 House 16H 0.926 0.065 0.988 0.015 0.809 0.125 0.952 0.044 0.752 0.188 0.961 0.057 Indian Pines 0.021 0.067 0.683 0.171 -0.0004 0.066 0.553 0.18 -0.26 0.328 0.333 0.192 JM1 0.691 0.229 0.965 0.042 0.596 0.198 0.916 0.085 -0.809 1.686 0.901 0.094 MC1 0.568 0.186 0.951 0.093 0.449 0.177 0.881 0.139 -0.839 0.177 0.873 0.332 Microaggregation2 0.366 0.236 0.982 0.021 0.177 0.231 0.957 0.049 -0.242 0.48 0.929 0.114 Mozilla4 0.884 0.147 0.9998 0.0003 0.909 0.141 0.967 0.074 0.124 1.551 0.9996 0.001 Phonemes 0.347 0.578 0.993 0.013 0.845 0.188 0.951 0.094 -8.204 14.423 0.975 0.076 Telco Cust. Churn 0.646 0.186 0.978 0.025 0.607 0.154 0.934 0.052 -0.156 0.486 0.939 0.054 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression I. A Comparison Between Via SHAP and a KAN Model with the Same Architecture We conducted an experiment to assess the impact of incorporating Shapley loss in the optimization process on predictive performance of a KAN model. Consequently, we compared KANVia to a KAN model with an identical architecture that does not compute Shapley values. As summarized in Table 10, the results indicate that KANVia generally outperforms the KAN model with the same architecture. In order to determine the statistical significance of these results, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (Wilcoxon, 1945) was employed to test the null hypothesis that no difference exists in predictive performance, as measured by AUC, between KANVia and the identical KAN model without Shapley values. The test results allowed for the rejection of the null hypothesis, indicating that KANVia significantly outperforms the KAN architecture that is not optimized to compute Shapley values with respect to the predictive performance as measured by the AUC. Table 10. A comparison between the predictive performance of KANVia and a KAN model with an identical architecture to KANVia but does not compute the Shapley values. The results are reported in AUC. Dataset KAN KANVia Abalone 0.882 0.001 0.87 0.003 Ada Prior 0.895 0.005 0.89 0.005 Adult 0.917 0.001 0.914 0.003 Bank32nh 0.886 0.001 0.878 0.001 Electricity 0.924 0.005 0.93 0.004 Elevators 0.935 0.003 0.935 0.002 Fars 0.957 0.001 0.96 0.0003 Helena 0.883 0.001 0.884 0.0001 Heloc 0.793 0.002 0.788 0.002 Higgs 0.801 0.002 0.801 0.001 LHC Identify Jet 0.944 0.0003 0.944 0.0001 House 16H 0.948 0.001 0.949 0.0007 Indian Pines 0.935 0.001 0.985 0.0004 Jannis 0.860 0.002 0.864 0.001 JM1 0.725 0.008 0.732 0.003 Magic Telescope 0.931 0.001 0.929 0.001 MC1 0.933 0.019 0.94 0.003 Microaggregation2 0.783 0.002 0.783 0.002 Mozilla4 0.967 0.001 0.968 0.0008 Satellite 0.987 0.003 0.996 0.001 PC2 0.458 0.049 0.827 0.009 Phonemes 0.945 0.002 0.946 0.003 Pollen 0.491 0.005 0.515 0.006 Telco Customer Churn 0.848 0.005 0.854 0.003 1st order theorem proving 0.805 0.005 0.822 0.002 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression J. Ablation Study In this section, we explore the influence of key hyperparameters on the performance and behavior of Via SHAP. Specifically, we investigate the effects of the scaling hyperparameter β and the number of sampled coalitions per data instance. We begin by analyzing how variations in β impact both predictive performance and the accuracy of the Shapley values generated by Via SHAP. We then examine the role of the number of sampled coalitions in model performance, followed by an evaluation of how changes in β affect the progress of the computed loss values during training. The findings provide valuable insights into the robustness and efficiency of Via SHAP under different hyperparameter settings. J.1. The Impact of Scaling Hyperparameter β on the Performance of Via SHAP We evaluated the performance of the models trained with different β values (in equation 7), where exponentially increasing values are tested. The models were trained using the default hyperparameter settings described in the experimental setup, except for the values of β. The AUC of the trained models is measured on the test set, as well as the similarity of the predicted Shapley values to the ground truth. The results indicate that the predictive performance of Via SHAP, as measured by the area under the ROC curve, remains largely unaffected by the value of β, even when β is increased exponentially. On the other hand, the similarity between the computed Shapley values and the ground truth improves as β increases. However, the model struggles to learn effectively after β exceeds 200, as shown in Figures 10 and 11. Figure 10. The effect of different values of β on the predictive performance (AUC), alignment with the true Shapley values (cosine similarity), and the similarity in the order of features to the ground truth (Spearman rank). Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 11. The effect of different values of β on the predictive performance (AUC), alignment with the true Shapley values (cosine similarity), and the similarity in the order of features to the ground truth (Spearman rank). J.2. The Number of Samples We assessed the impact of the number of sampled coalitions per data example on the performance of Via SHAP, retraining the model using the default hyperparameters with the exception of the sample size. We investigated an exponentially increasing range of sample sizes (2s), from 1 to 128. The findings suggest that the number of samples has a smaller effect on the performance of the trained models compared to β, which allows for effective training of Via SHAP models with as few as one sample per data instance. The results are illustrated in Figures 12 and 13. Figure 12. The effect of different number of samples on the predictive performance (AUC), alignment with the true Shapley values (cosine similarity), and the similarity in the order of features to the ground truth (Spearman rank). Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 13. The effect of different number of samples on the predictive performance (AUC), alignment with the true Shapley values (cosine similarity), and the similarity in the order of features to the ground truth (Spearman rank). Prediction via Shapley Value Regression J.3. The Effect of Applying a Link Function to the Predicted Outcome To examine the impact of employing a link function on the predictive performance of Via SHAP and the accuracy of its Shapley value approximations, we trained KANVia without applying a link function at the output layer and compared the predictive performance to that of KANVia with the default settings mentioned in the experimental setup. The results of the predictive comparison are summarized in Table 11. To evaluate the null hypothesis that there is no difference in predictive performance, measured by the AUC, between KANVia with and without a link function, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed, given that only two methods were compared. The results indicate that the null hypothesis can be rejected at the 0.05 significance level. Therefore, the results indicate that the presence of a link function does not significantly influence predictive performance in general. The similarity between the ground truth and the approximated Shapley values by KANVia, both with and without link functions, are reported in Table 12. The similarity of KANVia s approximations to the ground truth is measured using the cosine similarity and the Spearman s Rank as described in the experimental setup, which allow for measuring the similarity even if two explanations are not on the same scale, since Via SHAP allows for applying a link function to accommodate a valid range of outcomes which can lead Via SHAP s approximations to be on a different scale than the ground truth obtained using the unbiased Kernel SHAP. However, since we measure the effect of using the link function on the accuracy of Shapley values, we can also apply a metric that measures the similarity on the same scale for models without a link function. Therefore, we also apply R2 as a similarity metric to the ground truth Shapley values for models without link functions. The results presented in Table 12 demonstrate that Via SHAP without a link function significantly outperforms its counterpart with a link function. In order to test the null hypothesis that no difference exists in the accuracy of Shapley value approximations by KANVia with and without a link function, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied. The test results confirm that the null hypothesis can be rejected in both cases, whether Spearman s rank or cosine similarity is used as the similarity metric. Furthermore, the results show that R2 as a similarity metric is consistent with both Spearman s rank and cosine similarity. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 11. The effect of the link function on the predictive performance of KANVia as measured by AUC. The best-performing model is colored in light green . Dataset KANVia (without a link function) KANVia (default settings) Abalone 0.883 0.0002 0.87 0.003 Ada Prior 0.898 0.003 0.89 0.005 Adult 0.919 0.0005 0.914 0.003 Bank32nh 0.883 0.003 0.878 0.001 Electricity 0.934 0.004 0.93 0.004 Elevators 0.936 0.002 0.935 0.002 Fars 0.958 0.001 0.96 0.0003 Helena 0.868 0.006 0.884 0.0001 Heloc 0.792 0.001 0.788 0.002 Higgs 0.801 0.001 0.801 0.001 LHC Identify Jet 0.939 0.0005 0.944 0.0001 House 16H 0.949 0.001 0.949 0.0007 Indian Pines 0.982 0.001 0.985 0.0004 Jannis 0.861 0.001 0.864 0.001 JM1 0.686 0.024 0.732 0.003 Magic Telescope 0.921 0.002 0.929 0.001 MC1 0.952 0.011 0.94 0.003 Microaggregation2 0.764 0.008 0.783 0.002 Mozilla4 0.965 0.001 0.968 0.0008 Satellite 0.944 0.01 0.996 0.001 PC2 0.659 0.06 0.827 0.009 Phonemes 0.923 0.003 0.946 0.003 Pollen 0.501 0.002 0.515 0.006 Telco Customer Churn 0.857 0.003 0.854 0.003 1st order theorem proving 0.810 0.006 0.822 0.002 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 12. The effect of the link function on the similarity of the approximated Shapley values by KANVia. The best-performing model is colored in light green . Via SHAP with default settings Via SHAP without a link function Dataset Cosine Similarity Spearman s Rank Cosine Similarity Spearman s Rank R2 Abalone 0.969 0.017 0.6635 0.234 0.999 0.0008 0.971 0.052 0.999 0.002 Ada Prior 0.935 0.046 0.8763 0.088 0.963 0.037 0.909 0.068 0.9 0.095 Adult 0.931 0.049 0.9594 0.035 0.981 0.03 0.931 0.074 0.948 0.079 Bank32nh 0.779 0.163 0.432 0.151 0.948 0.045 0.648 0.114 0.87 0.142 Electricity 0.970 0.02 0.7983 0.183 0.998 0.004 0.967 0.043 0.992 0.012 Elevators 0.966 0.024 0.9203 0.064 0.997 0.004 0.969 0.026 0.993 0.009 Fars 0.886 0.253 0.347 0.328 0.962 0.036 0.882 0.073 0.895 0.073 Helena 0.856 0.092 0.669 0.152 0.874 0.095 0.702 0.148 0.677 0.204 Heloc 0.844 0.111 0.7409 0.147 0.962 0.036 0.882 0.073 0.895 0.105 Higgs 0.917 0.068 0.674 0.12 0.991 0.006 0.87 0.057 0.977 0.014 LHC Identify Jet 0.971 0.021 0.8575 0.119 0.999 0.002 0.974 0.032 0.998 0.005 House 16H 0.919 0.048 0.8876 0.092 0.988 0.015 0.952 0.044 0.961 0.057 Indian Pines 0.796 0.121 0.6991 0.116 0.683 0.171 0.553 0.18 0.333 0.192 Jannis 0.852 0.141 0.4775 0.131 0.898 0.072 0.624 0.113 0.722 0.183 JM1 0.88 0.044 0.7561 0.202 0.965 0.042 0.916 0.085 0.901 0.094 Magic Telescope 0.922 0.067 0.9 0.098 0.994 0.006 0.959 0.042 0.98 0.02 MC1 0.466 0.268 0.6212 0.157 0.951 0.093 0.881 0.139 0.873 0.332 Microaggregation2 0.938 0.049 0.8756 0.096 0.982 0.021 0.957 0.049 0.929 0.114 Mozilla4 0.953 0.023 0.9423 0.092 0.9998 0.0003 0.967 0.074 0.9996 0.0007 Satellite 0.841 0.116 0.746 0.212 0.976 0.033 0.894 0.102 0.814 0.296 PC2 0.534 0.183 0.7326 0.161 0.956 0.087 0.875 0.127 0.895 0.223 Phonemes 0.811 0.162 0.9407 0.103 0.993 0.013 0.951 0.094 0.975 0.076 Pollen 0.952 0.059 0.372 0.429 0.994 0.013 0.959 0.076 0.929 0.212 Telco Customer Churn 0.81 0.108 0.8476 0.098 0.978 0.025 0.934 0.052 0.939 0.054 1st order theorem proving 0.725 0.179 0.6228 0.188 0.778 0.123 0.66 0.146 0.429 0.479 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression J.4. The Effect of the Efficiency Constraint We investigate the impact of the efficiency constraint (4) on the predictive performance of Via SHAP and the similarity of its approximate Shapley values to the ground truth. The experimental results, presented in Tables 13 and 14, indicate that imposing the efficiency constraint has no significant effect on either the predictive performance of Via SHAP or the accuracy of its explanations. To formally test this, we evaluate the null hypothesis that no significant difference exists in predictive performance, measured by AUC, between models trained with or without the efficiency constraint. Since only two approaches are compared, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (Wilcoxon, 1945) is employed. The results confirm that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the 0.05 significance level, indicating no significant difference in predictive performance between the two approaches. Significance tests are also applied to evaluate the similarity of the approximated Shapley values to the ground truth based on cosine similarity, Spearman s rank, and R2. The results indicate no significant difference between Via SHAP models trained with and without the efficiency constraint. Table 13. The effect of the efficiency constraint on the predictive performance of KANVia as measured by AUC. The best-performing model is colored in light green . Dataset Unconstrained Constrained Abalone 0.883 0.0003 0.883 0.0002 Ada Prior 0.897 0.003 0.898 0.003 Adult 0.919 0.0007 0.919 0.0005 Bank32nh 0.884 0.002 0.883 0.003 Electricity 0.936 0.004 0.934 0.004 Elevators 0.933 0.002 0.936 0.003 Fars 0.959 0.001 0.958 0.002 Helena 0.870 0.005 0.868 0.006 Heloc 0.792 0.002 0.792 0.001 Higgs 0.800 0.002 0.801 0.001 LHC Identify Jet 0.939 0.0006 0.939 0.0005 House 16H 0.948 0.001 0.949 0.001 Indian Pines 0.982 0.002 0.982 0.001 Jannis 0.860 0.003 0.861 0.001 JM1 0.691 0.026 0.686 0.025 Magic Telescope 0.921 0.002 0.921 0.002 MC1 0.942 0.011 0.952 0.011 Microaggregation2 0.763 0.009 0.764 0.008 Mozilla4 0.965 0.001 0.965 0.001 Satellite 0.926 0.006 0.944 0.010 PC2 0.670 0.046 0.659 0.060 Phonemes 0.919 0.006 0.923 0.003 Pollen 0.499 0.002 0.501 0.002 Telco Customer Churn 0.853 0.004 0.857 0.003 1st order theorem proving 0.809 0.007 0.810 0.006 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 14. The similarity to the ground truth explanations when KANVia optimized with and without the efficiency constraint. The similarity is measured using cosine similarity, Spearman s rank, and R2. The best-performing model is colored in light green. Cosine Similarity Spearman s Rank R2 Dataset Unconstrained Constrained Unconstrained Constrained Unconstrained Constrained Abalone 0.999 0.001 0.999 0.001 0.972 0.056 0.971 0.052 0.999 0.002 0.999 0.002 Ada Prior 0.949 0.047 0.963 0.037 0.909 0.067 0.909 0.068 0.8461 0.138 0.9 0.095 Adult 0.987 0.023 0.981 0.03 0.955 0.048 0.931 0.074 0.966 0.062 0.948 0.079 Bank32nh 0.945 0.045 0.948 0.045 0.654 0.117 0.648 0.114 0.849 0.125 0.87 0.142 Electricity 0.997 0.005 0.998 0.004 0.964 0.048 0.967 0.043 0.991 0.015 0.992 0.012 Elevators 0.996 0.004 0.997 0.004 0.967 0.03 0.969 0.026 0.991 0.011 0.993 0.009 Fars 0.998 0.008 0.962 0.036 0.908 0.076 0.882 0.073 0.994 0.022 0.895 0.073 Helena 0.888 0.085 0.874 0.095 0.719 0.139 0.702 0.148 0.713 0.187 0.677 0.204 Heloc 0.96 0.037 0.962 0.036 0.862 0.084 0.882 0.073 0.894 0.097 0.895 0.105 Higgs 0.993 0.004 0.991 0.006 0.88 0.055 0.87 0.057 0.984 0.011 0.977 0.014 LHC Identify Jet 0.999 0.002 0.999 0.002 0.97 0.038 0.974 0.032 0.998 0.006 0.998 0.005 House 16H 0.99 0.012 0.988 0.015 0.959 0.037 0.952 0.044 0.969 0.032 0.961 0.057 Indian Pines 0.663 0.164 0.683 0.171 0.518 0.184 0.553 0.18 0.297 0.178 0.333 0.192 Jannis 0.903 0.071 0.898 0.072 0.649 0.122 0.624 0.113 0.727 0.191 0.722 0.183 JM1 0.95 0.041 0.965 0.042 0.888 0.102 0.916 0.085 0.851 0.123 0.901 0.094 Magic Telescope 0.995 0.005 0.994 0.006 0.964 0.039 0.959 0.042 0.985 0.017 0.98 0.02 MC1 0.941 0.103 0.951 0.093 0.862 0.145 0.881 0.139 0.869 0.239 0.873 0.332 Microaggregation2 0.986 0.021 0.982 0.021 0.963 0.05 0.957 0.049 0.956 0.061 0.929 0.114 Mozilla4 0.9998 0.001 0.9998 0.0003 0.965 0.074 0.967 0.074 0.9996 0.002 0.9996 0.001 Satellite 0.965 0.043 0.976 0.033 0.858 0.129 0.894 0.102 0.823 0.195 0.814 0.296 PC2 0.961 0.085 0.956 0.087 0.889 0.134 0.875 0.127 0.913 0.206 0.895 0.223 Phonemes 0.994 0.016 0.993 0.013 0.964 0.086 0.951 0.094 0.98 0.063 0.975 0.076 Pollen 0.996 0.016 0.994 0.013 0.954 0.095 0.959 0.076 0.967 0.107 0.929 0.212 Telco Customer Churn 0.974 0.02 0.978 0.025 0.911 0.051 0.934 0.052 0.923 0.051 0.939 0.054 1st order theorem proving 0.786 0.128 0.778 0.123 0.669 0.156 0.66 0.146 0.464 0.21 0.429 0.479 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression J.5. The Progress of Training and Validation Losses In this subsection, we report the progression of training and validation losses with different values of the hyperparameter β using six datasets. A common trend observed across models trained on the six datasets is that, with different values of β, the Shapley loss (scaled by β) consistently decreases quickly below the level of the classification loss, except for the First Order Theorem Proving dataset (Figure 15), which is a multinomial classification dataset. For the First Order Theorem Proving dataset, the Shapley loss remains at a scale determined by the β factor throughout the training time. However, the model for the First Order Theorem Proving dataset can still learn a function that estimates Shapley values with good accuracy, as shown in Tables 2 and 3. Moreover, it benefits from larger β values to achieve accurate Shapley value approximations, as illustrated in Figure 10. Additionally, the results indicate that Via SHAP generally tends to take longer to converge as β values increase. Figure 14. The effect of β value on the progress of the training and the validation loss values. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 15. The effect of β value on the progress of the training and the validation loss values. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 16. The effect of β value on the progress of the training and the validation loss values. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 17. The effect of β value on the progress of the training and the validation loss values. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 18. The effect of β value on the progress of the training and the validation loss values. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Figure 19. The effect of β value on the progress of the training and the validation loss values. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression K. A Comparison Between Via SHAP and Fast SHAP We compared the accuracy of Via SHAP s Shapley value approximations to Fast SHAP, using Via SHAP as a black-box model within the Fast SHAP framework. Via SHAP is implemented using KANVia without a link function, while Fast SHAP is using the default settings. The evaluation employed metrics such as R2, cosine similarity, and Spearman s rank correlation to measure the similarity between the computed Shapley values and the ground truth. The results demonstrate that Via SHAP achieves significantly higher similarity to the ground truth compared to Fast SHAP. This conclusion is supported by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, which enabled rejection of the null hypothesis that there is no difference in similarity to the ground truth Shapley values between Via SHAP and Fast SHAP. The test confirmed significant differences using all evaluated similarity metrics, including R2, cosine similarity, and Spearman s rank correlation. The detailed results are available in Table 16. L. A Comparison Between the Inference Time of Via SHAP and Kernel SHAP In Table 15, we report the time required to explain 1000 instances using Kernel SHAP and Via SHAP (KANVia) on six datasets using an NVIDIA Tesla V100f GPU and 16 cores of an Intel Xeon Gold 6338 processor. Table 15. The time (in seconds) required to explain 1000 predictions from 6 different datasets using Kernel SHAP and Via SHAP. Dataset Kernel SHAP KANVia Adult 56.92 0.0026 Elevators 54.22 0.0021 House 16 53.12 0.0052 Indian Pines 43124.66 0.0023 Microaggregation 2 79.97 0.0022 First order proving theorem 436.25 0.0022 M. Limitations of Via SHAP Via SHAP operates under the assumption that the selected base model can be optimized using backpropagation. Hence, models that employ other optimization algorithms, such as decision trees, are not suitable for this approach. Nevertheless, Via SHAP can be extended to work with methods that are not based on backpropagation. For example, we can train one regressor per dimension of ϕVia(x). The empirical results presented in Appendix H indicate that Via SHAP does not yield accurate models when trained using the marginal expectations value function, which requires further investigation. Furthermore, as demonstrated in Appendix D, Via SHAP does not produce accurate predictors when trained using a small-sized MLP consisting of two hidden layers. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 16. A comparison between Via SHAP and Fast SHAP with respect to the similarity of the approximated Shapley values to the ground truth values. The best-performing model is colored in light green . Cosine Similarity Spearman s Rank R2 Dataset Via SHAP Fast SHAP Via SHAP Fast SHAP Via SHAP Fast SHAP Abalone 0.999 0.0008 0.999 0.002 0.971 0.052 0.966 0.055 0.999 0.002 0.996 0.008 Ada Prior 0.963 0.037 0.703 0.25 0.909 0.068 0.64 0.24 0.887 0.105 0.042 1.359 Adult 0.981 0.03 0.956 0.072 0.931 0.074 0.893 0.115 0.952 0.072 0.853 0.298 Bank32nh 0.948 0.045 0.897 0.079 0.648 0.114 0.527 0.133 0.852 0.161 0.728 0.29 Electricity 0.998 0.004 0.978 0.06 0.967 0.043 0.921 0.101 0.993 0.011 0.914 0.306 Elevators 0.997 0.004 0.994 0.006 0.969 0.026 0.941 0.047 0.993 0.009 0.983 0.023 Fars 0.997 0.008 0.997 0.021 0.849 0.098 0.834 0.124 0.994 0.022 0.991 0.028 Helena 0.874 0.095 0.822 0.139 0.702 0.148 0.6 0.193 0.677 0.204 0.532 0.29 Heloc 0.962 0.036 0.935 0.064 0.882 0.073 0.826 0.111 0.894 0.098 0.824 0.177 Higgs 0.991 0.006 0.994 0.004 0.87 0.057 0.899 0.049 0.977 0.014 0.986 0.01 LHC Identify Jet 0.999 0.002 0.999 0.003 0.974 0.032 0.971 0.035 0.998 0.005 0.997 0.016 House 16H 0.988 0.015 0.964 0.035 0.952 0.044 0.891 0.09 0.964 0.039 0.89 0.107 Indian Pines 0.683 0.171 0.423 0.154 0.553 0.18 0.204 0.122 0.333 0.192 -0.615 0.912 Jannis 0.898 0.072 0.92 0.064 0.624 0.113 0.673 0.106 0.722 0.183 0.776 0.179 JM1 0.965 0.042 0.98 0.042 0.916 0.085 0.934 0.083 0.887 0.206 0.925 0.37 Magic Telescope 0.994 0.006 0.984 0.023 0.959 0.042 0.918 0.084 0.98 0.021 0.946 0.094 MC1 0.951 0.093 0.789 0.254 0.881 0.139 0.638 0.297 0.881 0.346 -0.024 9.964 Microaggregation2 0.982 0.021 0.99 0.017 0.957 0.049 0.97 0.041 0.944 0.061 0.966 0.054 Mozilla4 0.9998 0.0003 0.994 0.017 0.967 0.074 0.921 0.141 0.9996 0.0007 0.984 0.049 Satellite 0.976 0.033 0.858 0.114 0.894 0.102 0.55 0.25 0.873 0.151 0.126 0.793 PC2 0.956 0.087 0.786 0.234 0.875 0.127 0.619 0.249 0.891 0.272 0.274 1.616 Phonemes 0.993 0.013 0.981 0.036 0.951 0.094 0.946 0.096 0.971 0.071 0.925 0.165 Pollen 0.994 0.013 0.984 0.024 0.959 0.076 0.905 0.129 0.933 0.276 0.855 0.23 Telco Customer Churn 0.978 0.025 0.963 0.045 0.934 0.052 0.892 0.087 0.924 0.085 0.899 0.109 1st order theorem proving 0.778 0.123 0.776 0.174 0.66 0.146 0.658 0.206 0.429 0.479 0.367 2.832 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression N. Computational Cost The experiments were conducted using an NVIDIA Tesla V100f GPU and 16 cores of an Intel Xeon Gold 6338 processor. The training time required for both KANVia and MLPVia are recorded on 1,000 data examples with varying numbers of coalitions (Table 17). The inference time is also recorded on 1,000 data example for both KANVia and MLPVia as shown in Table 18. All the results are reported as the mean and standard deviation across five different runs. Generally, MLPVia is faster than KANVia in both training and inference. Additionally, while the number of samples per data example increased exponentially, the computational cost during training did not rise at the same rate, as depicted in Figure 20. Figure 20. The training time and prediction time on 1000 data instance of KANVia and MLPVia. Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 17. The training time in seconds for 1000 data instances using KANVia and MLPVia. KANVia MLPVia Dataset No Sampling 2 Samples 16 Samples 32 Samples No Sampling 2 Samples 16 Samples 32 Samples Abalone 0.0058 0.0005 0.0208 0.0013 0.0209 0.0009 0.0228 0.0016 0.002 0.0002 0.0053 0.0007 0.0056 0.0005 0.0062 0.0006 Ada Prior 0.0068 0.0005 0.024 0.0014 0.0235 0.0017 0.0284 0.0021 0.0028 0.0003 0.0071 0.0003 0.0079 0.0005 0.0104 0.0007 Adult 0.0068 0.0008 0.0227 0.0011 0.0239 0.0018 0.0288 0.0027 0.003 0.0005 0.0072 0.0003 0.0078 0.0004 0.0101 0.0004 Bank32nh 0.0051 0.0005 0.018 0.001 0.019 0.0009 0.0204 0.0012 0.002 0.0005 0.0048 0.0009 0.0056 0.0005 0.007 0.0007 Electricity 0.0059 0.0005 0.0209 0.0012 0.0211 0.0013 0.023 0.0017 0.0021 0.0004 0.0051 0.0004 0.0056 0.0005 0.0061 0.0005 Elevators 0.0051 0.0005 0.0177 0.0007 0.0187 0.0013 0.0193 0.0011 0.0019 0.0004 0.0044 0.0003 0.0052 0.0005 0.0059 0.0004 Fars 0.009 0.0006 0.0262 0.0009 0.0274 0.0017 0.0358 0.0017 0.0064 0.0004 0.0102 0.0004 0.0114 0.0005 0.0153 0.0005 Helena 0.0054 0.0007 0.0184 0.0012 0.0195 0.0014 0.0208 0.002 0.0021 0.0005 0.0048 0.0004 0.0061 0.0008 0.0073 0.0008 Heloc 0.0051 0.0005 0.0177 0.0007 0.0188 0.0014 0.0198 0.0013 0.0019 0.0004 0.0046 0.0002 0.0055 0.0006 0.0063 0.0004 Higgs 0.0067 0.0003 0.019 0.0005 0.0198 0.0006 0.0211 0.0013 0.0021 0.0002 0.0062 0.0004 0.0067 0.0004 0.0075 0.0005 LHC Identify Jet 0.0055 0.0003 0.0184 0.0007 0.0187 0.0008 0.0198 0.0012 0.0022 0.0003 0.005 0.0002 0.0058 0.0004 0.0064 0.0003 House 16H 0.0052 0.0006 0.0176 0.0008 0.0238 0.0075 0.0195 0.0018 0.002 0.0004 0.0045 0.0004 0.0052 0.0005 0.0058 0.0005 Indian Pines 0.0054 0.0006 0.0194 0.0011 0.0268 0.0022 0.0355 0.0026 0.0021 0.0004 0.0058 0.0004 0.0129 0.0006 0.0208 0.0009 Jannis 0.0073 0.0006 0.0195 0.0006 0.0214 0.001 0.0235 0.0016 0.0022 0.0003 0.0053 0.0002 0.0073 0.0005 0.0096 0.0002 JM1 0.0051 0.0005 0.018 0.0007 0.0189 0.0009 0.0202 0.0015 0.0019 0.0003 0.0044 0.0002 0.0054 0.0004 0.0063 0.0004 Magic Telescope 0.0051 0.0005 0.0178 0.0009 0.0183 0.001 0.0188 0.0012 0.0019 0.0002 0.0046 0.0007 0.005 0.0005 0.0054 0.0005 MC1 0.0051 0.0005 0.0182 0.0008 0.0194 0.0008 0.0209 0.0014 0.0021 0.0007 0.0045 0.0003 0.0063 0.0004 0.0076 0.0007 Microaggregation 2 0.0053 0.0007 0.0187 0.0011 0.0189 0.001 0.0198 0.0013 0.0019 0.0003 0.0045 0.0002 0.0055 0.0004 0.0062 0.0004 Mozilla4 0.0051 0.0006 0.0178 0.0007 0.0184 0.0015 0.0188 0.0016 0.0019 0.0003 0.0044 0.0003 0.0048 0.0003 0.005 0.0004 Satellite 0.0051 0.0005 0.018 0.001 0.0197 0.002 0.0207 0.0015 0.002 0.0004 0.0046 0.0003 0.006 0.0007 0.0073 0.0005 PC2 0.005 0.0004 0.0178 0.0007 0.0192 0.0009 0.0209 0.0019 0.0019 0.0003 0.0045 0.0002 0.0059 0.0005 0.0073 0.0006 Phonemes 0.0051 0.0005 0.0181 0.0018 0.0179 0.0008 0.0183 0.0013 0.0019 0.0002 0.0043 0.0002 0.0047 0.0003 0.0052 0.0007 Pollen 0.005 0.0004 0.018 0.0015 0.0181 0.0013 0.0185 0.0015 0.0019 0.0004 0.0044 0.0003 0.0048 0.0004 0.005 0.0004 Telco Customer Churn 0.0076 0.0008 0.0247 0.0014 0.0256 0.0016 0.0338 0.002 0.0038 0.0005 0.0093 0.0004 0.0103 0.0006 0.0138 0.0004 1st Ord. Theorem Prov. 0.0052 0.0006 0.0186 0.0013 0.0294 0.0197 0.0224 0.002 0.0019 0.0003 0.0048 0.0003 0.0065 0.0003 0.0087 0.0005 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression Table 18. The prediction running time in seconds for 1000 data instances using KANVia and MLPVia. Dataset KANVia MLPVia Abalone 0.0024 0.0003 0.0004 0.00003 Ada Prior 0.003 0.0008 0.0006 0.000005 Adult 0.0026 0.0004 0.0006 0.000005 Bank32nh 0.0021 0.0002 0.0004 0.0001 Electricity 0.0024 0.0003 0.0005 0.0002 Elevators 0.0021 0.0002 0.0005 0.0003 Fars 0.0031 0.0005 0.0009 0.0001 Helena 0.0023 0.0004 0.0004 0.0001 Heloc 0.0022 0.0002 0.0003 0.000005 Higgs 0.0022 0.0002 0.0003 0.00001 LHC Identify Jet 0.0023 0.0004 0.0004 0.00001 House 16H 0.0052 0.0005 0.0004 0.0001 Indian Pines 0.0023 0.0003 0.0004 0.0001 Jannis 0.0023 0.0003 0.0004 0.00001 JM1 0.0026 0.0012 0.0003 0.00001 Magic Telescope 0.0022 0.0002 0.0003 0.00001 MC1 0.0023 0.0003 0.0004 0.0001 Microaggregation 2 0.0022 0.0002 0.0004 0.00001 Mozilla 4 0.0022 0.0002 0.0004 0.0001 Satellite 0.0022 0.0003 0.0004 0.0001 PC2 0.0021 0.0003 0.0003 0.00001 Phonemes 0.0021 0.0001 0.0003 0.000005 Pollen 0.0022 0.0003 0.0004 0.0001 Telco Customer Churn 0.003 0.0005 0.0009 0.0001 1st Order Theorem Proving 0.0022 0.0003 0.0004 0.000004 Prediction via Shapley Value Regression O. Dataset Details Table 19 presents an overview of the datasets used in the experiments. The table includes the number of classes, number of features, dataset size, training, validation, and test split sizes. Additionally, the table provides the corresponding dataset ID from Open ML. Table 19. The dataset information. Dataset # Features # Classes Dataset Size Train. Set Val. Set Test Set Open ML ID Abalone 8 2 4177 2506 836 835 720 Ada Prior 14 2 4562 2737 913 912 1037 Adult 14 2 48842 43957 2443 2442 1590 Bank32nh 32 2 8,192 5,734 1,229 1,229 833 Electricity 8 2 45,312 36,249 4,532 4,531 151 Elevators 18 2 16,599 11,619 2,490 2,490 846 Fars 29 8 100,968 80,774 10,097 10,097 40672 Helena 27 100 65,196 41,724 10,432 13,040 41169 Heloc 22 2 10,000 7,500 1,250 1,250 45023 Higgs 28 2 98,050 88,245 4,903 4,902 23512 LHC Identify Jet 16 5 830,000 749,075 39,425 41,500 42468 House 16H 16 2 22,784 18,227 2,279 2,278 821 Indian Pines 220 8 9,144 5,852 1,463 1,829 41972 Jannis 54 4 83,733 53,588 13,398 16,747 41168 JM1 21 2 10,885 8,708 1,089 1,088 1053 Magic Telescope 10 2 19,020 15,216 1,902 1,902 1120 MC1 38 2 9,466 7,478 994 994 1056 Microaggregation 2 20 5 20,000 12,800 3,200 4,000 41671 Mozilla 4 5 2 15,545 12,436 1,555 1,554 1046 Satellite 36 2 5,100 2,805 1,148 1,147 40900 PC2 36 2 5,589 3,353 1,118 1,118 1069 Phonemes 5 2 5,404 3,782 811 811 1489 Pollen 5 2 3,848 2,308 770 770 871 Telco Customer Churn 19 2 7,043 4,930 1,057 1,056 42178 1st Order Theorem Proving 51 6 6,118 3,915 979 1,224 1475