csinva/imodelsX

Interpret text data with LLMs (sklearn compatible).

177

stars

389

commits

Python

primary language

Apr 22, 2026

updated

csinva.io/imodelsX/
ai
deep-learning
explainability
huggingface
interpretability
language-model
machine-learning
ml
natural-language-processing
natural-language-understanding
neural-network
pytorch
scikit-learn
text
text-classification
transformer-models
xai

README

Scikit-learn friendly library to explain, predict, and steer text models/data.
Also a bunch of utilities for getting started with text data.

πŸ“– demo notebooks

Explainable modeling/steering

ModelReferenceOutputDescription
Tree-PromptπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–,Explanation
+ Steering
Generates a tree of prompts to
steer an LLM (Official)
iPromptπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Explanation
+ Steering
Generates a prompt that
explains patterns in data (Official)
AutoPromptγ…€γ…€πŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„Explanation
+ Steering
Find a natural-language prompt
using input-gradients
D3πŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–ExplanationExplain the difference between two distributions
SASCγ…€γ…€πŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„ExplanationExplain a black-box text module
using an LLM (Official)
Aug-LinearπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Linear modelFit better linear model using an LLM
to extract embeddings (Official)
Aug-TreeπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Decision treeFit better decision tree using an LLM
to expand features (Official)
QAEmbπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Explainable
embedding
Generate interpretable embeddings
by asking LLMs questions (Official)
KANπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Small
network
Fit 2-layer Kolmogorov-Arnold network

πŸ“–Demo notebooks   πŸ—‚οΈ Doc   πŸ”— Reference code   πŸ“„ Research paper
βŒ› We plan to support other interpretable algorithms like RLPrompt, CBMs, and NBDT. If you want to contribute an algorithm, feel free to open a PR πŸ˜„

General utilities

ModelReference
πŸ—‚οΈ LLM wrapperEasily call different LLMs
πŸ—‚οΈ Dataset wrapperDownload minimially processed huggingface datasets
πŸ—‚οΈ Bag of NgramsLearn a linear model of ngrams
πŸ—‚οΈ Linear FinetuneFinetune a single linear layer on top of LLM embeddings

Quickstart

Installation: pip install imodelsx (or, for more control, clone and install from source)

Demos: see the demo notebooks

Natural-language explanations

Tree-prompt

from imodelsx import TreePromptClassifier
import datasets
import numpy as np
from sklearn.tree import plot_tree
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# set up data
rng = np.random.default_rng(seed=42)
dset_train = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['train']
dset_train = dset_train.select(rng.choice(
    len(dset_train), size=100, replace=False))
dset_val = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['validation']
dset_val = dset_val.select(rng.choice(
    len(dset_val), size=100, replace=False))

# set up arguments
prompts = [
    "This movie is",
    " Positive or Negative? The movie was",
    " The sentiment of the movie was",
    " The plot of the movie was really",
    " The acting in the movie was",
]
verbalizer = {0: " Negative.", 1: " Positive."}
checkpoint = "gpt2"

# fit model
m = TreePromptClassifier(
    checkpoint=checkpoint,
    prompts=prompts,
    verbalizer=verbalizer,
    cache_prompt_features_dir=None,  # 'cache_prompt_features_dir/gp2',
)
m.fit(dset_train["text"], dset_train["label"])


# compute accuracy
preds = m.predict(dset_val['text'])
print('\nTree-Prompt acc (val) ->',
      np.mean(preds == dset_val['label']))  # -> 0.7

# compare to accuracy for individual prompts
for i, prompt in enumerate(prompts):
    print(i, prompt, '->', m.prompt_accs_[i])  # -> 0.65, 0.5, 0.5, 0.56, 0.51

# visualize decision tree
plot_tree(
    m.clf_,
    fontsize=10,
    feature_names=m.feature_names_,
    class_names=list(verbalizer.values()),
    filled=True,
)
plt.show()

iPrompt

from imodelsx import explain_dataset_iprompt, get_add_two_numbers_dataset

# get a simple dataset of adding two numbers
input_strings, output_strings = get_add_two_numbers_dataset(num_examples=100)
for i in range(5):
    print(repr(input_strings[i]), repr(output_strings[i]))

# explain the relationship between the inputs and outputs
# with a natural-language prompt string
prompts, metadata = explain_dataset_iprompt(
    input_strings=input_strings,
    output_strings=output_strings,
    checkpoint='EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B', # which language model to use
    num_learned_tokens=3, # how long of a prompt to learn
    n_shots=3, # shots per example
    n_epochs=15, # how many epochs to search
    verbose=0, # how much to print
    llm_float16=True, # whether to load the model in float_16
)
--------
prompts is a list of found natural-language prompt strings

D3 (DescribeDistributionalDifferences)

from imodelsx import explain_dataset_d3
hypotheses, hypothesis_scores = explain_dataset_d3(
    pos=positive_samples, # List[str] of positive examples
    neg=negative_samples, # another List[str]
    num_steps=100,
    num_folds=2,
    batch_size=64,
)

SASC

Here, we explain a module rather than a dataset

from imodelsx import explain_module_sasc
# a toy module that responds to the length of a string
mod = lambda str_list: np.array([len(s) for s in str_list])

# a toy dataset where the longest strings are animals
text_str_list = ["red", "blue", "x", "1", "2", "hippopotamus", "elephant", "rhinoceros"]
explanation_dict = explain_module_sasc(
    text_str_list,
    mod,
    ngrams=1,
)

Aug-imodels

Use these just a like a scikit-learn model. During training, they fit better features via LLMs, but at test-time they are extremely fast and completely transparent.

from imodelsx import AugLinearClassifier, AugTreeClassifier, AugLinearRegressor, AugTreeRegressor
import datasets
import numpy as np

# set up data
dset = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['train']
dset = dset.select(np.random.choice(len(dset), size=300, replace=False))
dset_val = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['validation']
dset_val = dset_val.select(np.random.choice(len(dset_val), size=300, replace=False))

# fit model
m = AugLinearClassifier(
    checkpoint='textattack/distilbert-base-uncased-rotten-tomatoes',
    ngrams=2, # use bigrams
)
m.fit(dset['text'], dset['label'])

# predict
preds = m.predict(dset_val['text'])
print('acc_val', np.mean(preds == dset_val['label']))

# interpret
print('Total ngram coefficients: ', len(m.coefs_dict_))
print('Most positive ngrams')
for k, v in sorted(m.coefs_dict_.items(), key=lambda item: item[1], reverse=True)[:8]:
    print('\t', k, round(v, 2))
print('Most negative ngrams')
for k, v in sorted(m.coefs_dict_.items(), key=lambda item: item[1])[:8]:
    print('\t', k, round(v, 2))

KAN

import imodelsx
from sklearn.datasets import make_classification, make_regression
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score
import numpy as np

X, y = make_classification(n_samples=5000, n_features=5, n_informative=3)
model = imodelsx.KANClassifier(hidden_layer_size=64, device='cpu',
                               regularize_activation=1.0, regularize_entropy=1.0)
model.fit(X, y)
y_pred = model.predict(X)
print('Test acc', accuracy_score(y, y_pred))

# now try regression
X, y = make_regression(n_samples=5000, n_features=5, n_informative=3)
model = imodelsx.kan.KANRegressor(hidden_layer_size=64, device='cpu',
                                  regularize_activation=1.0, regularize_entropy=1.0)
model.fit(X, y)
y_pred = model.predict(X)
print('Test correlation', np.corrcoef(y, y_pred.flatten())[0, 1])

General utilities

Easy baselines

Easy-to-fit baselines that follow the sklearn API.

from imodelsx import LinearFinetuneClassifier, LinearNgramClassifier
# fit a simple one-layer finetune on top of LLM embeddings
m = LinearFinetuneClassifier(
    checkpoint='distilbert-base-uncased',
)
m.fit(dset['text'], dset['label'])
preds = m.predict(dset_val['text'])
acc = (preds == dset_val['label']).mean()
print('validation acc', acc)

LLM wrapper

Easy API for calling different language models with caching (much more lightweight than langchain).

import imodelsx.llm
# supports any huggingface checkpoint or openai checkpoint (including chat models)
llm = imodelsx.llm.get_llm(
    checkpoint="gpt2-xl",  # text-davinci-003, gpt-3.5-turbo, ...
    CACHE_DIR=".cache",
)
out = llm("May the Force be")
llm("May the Force be") # when computing the same string again, uses the cache

Data wrapper

API for loading huggingface datasets with basic preprocessing.

import imodelsx.data
dset, dataset_key_text = imodelsx.data.load_huggingface_dataset('ag_news')
# Ensures that dset has a split named 'train' and 'validation',
# and that the input data is contained for each split in a column given by {dataset_key_text}

Related work

  • imodels package (JOSS 2021 github) - interpretable ML package for concise, transparent, and accurate predictive modeling (sklearn-compatible).
  • Rethinking Interpretability in the Era of Large Language Models (arXiv 2024 pdf) - overview of using LLMs to interpret datasets and yield natural-language explanations
  • Experiments in using clinical rule development: github
  • Experiments in automatically generating brain explanations: github
  • Interpretation regularization (ICML 2020 pdf, github) - penalizes CD / ACD scores during training to make models generalize better

Contributors

csinva

367 commits

jxmorris12

14 commits

arminaskari

3 commits

csinva/imodelsX

Interpret text data with LLMs (sklearn compatible).

177

stars

389

commits

Python

primary language

Apr 22, 2026

updated

csinva.io/imodelsX/
ai
deep-learning
explainability
huggingface
interpretability
language-model
machine-learning
ml
natural-language-processing
natural-language-understanding
neural-network
pytorch
scikit-learn
text
text-classification
transformer-models
xai

README

Scikit-learn friendly library to explain, predict, and steer text models/data.
Also a bunch of utilities for getting started with text data.

πŸ“– demo notebooks

Explainable modeling/steering

ModelReferenceOutputDescription
Tree-PromptπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–,Explanation
+ Steering
Generates a tree of prompts to
steer an LLM (Official)
iPromptπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Explanation
+ Steering
Generates a prompt that
explains patterns in data (Official)
AutoPromptγ…€γ…€πŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„Explanation
+ Steering
Find a natural-language prompt
using input-gradients
D3πŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–ExplanationExplain the difference between two distributions
SASCγ…€γ…€πŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„ExplanationExplain a black-box text module
using an LLM (Official)
Aug-LinearπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Linear modelFit better linear model using an LLM
to extract embeddings (Official)
Aug-TreeπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Decision treeFit better decision tree using an LLM
to expand features (Official)
QAEmbπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Explainable
embedding
Generate interpretable embeddings
by asking LLMs questions (Official)
KANπŸ—‚οΈ, πŸ”—, πŸ“„, πŸ“–Small
network
Fit 2-layer Kolmogorov-Arnold network

πŸ“–Demo notebooks   πŸ—‚οΈ Doc   πŸ”— Reference code   πŸ“„ Research paper
βŒ› We plan to support other interpretable algorithms like RLPrompt, CBMs, and NBDT. If you want to contribute an algorithm, feel free to open a PR πŸ˜„

General utilities

ModelReference
πŸ—‚οΈ LLM wrapperEasily call different LLMs
πŸ—‚οΈ Dataset wrapperDownload minimially processed huggingface datasets
πŸ—‚οΈ Bag of NgramsLearn a linear model of ngrams
πŸ—‚οΈ Linear FinetuneFinetune a single linear layer on top of LLM embeddings

Quickstart

Installation: pip install imodelsx (or, for more control, clone and install from source)

Demos: see the demo notebooks

Natural-language explanations

Tree-prompt

from imodelsx import TreePromptClassifier
import datasets
import numpy as np
from sklearn.tree import plot_tree
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# set up data
rng = np.random.default_rng(seed=42)
dset_train = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['train']
dset_train = dset_train.select(rng.choice(
    len(dset_train), size=100, replace=False))
dset_val = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['validation']
dset_val = dset_val.select(rng.choice(
    len(dset_val), size=100, replace=False))

# set up arguments
prompts = [
    "This movie is",
    " Positive or Negative? The movie was",
    " The sentiment of the movie was",
    " The plot of the movie was really",
    " The acting in the movie was",
]
verbalizer = {0: " Negative.", 1: " Positive."}
checkpoint = "gpt2"

# fit model
m = TreePromptClassifier(
    checkpoint=checkpoint,
    prompts=prompts,
    verbalizer=verbalizer,
    cache_prompt_features_dir=None,  # 'cache_prompt_features_dir/gp2',
)
m.fit(dset_train["text"], dset_train["label"])


# compute accuracy
preds = m.predict(dset_val['text'])
print('\nTree-Prompt acc (val) ->',
      np.mean(preds == dset_val['label']))  # -> 0.7

# compare to accuracy for individual prompts
for i, prompt in enumerate(prompts):
    print(i, prompt, '->', m.prompt_accs_[i])  # -> 0.65, 0.5, 0.5, 0.56, 0.51

# visualize decision tree
plot_tree(
    m.clf_,
    fontsize=10,
    feature_names=m.feature_names_,
    class_names=list(verbalizer.values()),
    filled=True,
)
plt.show()

iPrompt

from imodelsx import explain_dataset_iprompt, get_add_two_numbers_dataset

# get a simple dataset of adding two numbers
input_strings, output_strings = get_add_two_numbers_dataset(num_examples=100)
for i in range(5):
    print(repr(input_strings[i]), repr(output_strings[i]))

# explain the relationship between the inputs and outputs
# with a natural-language prompt string
prompts, metadata = explain_dataset_iprompt(
    input_strings=input_strings,
    output_strings=output_strings,
    checkpoint='EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B', # which language model to use
    num_learned_tokens=3, # how long of a prompt to learn
    n_shots=3, # shots per example
    n_epochs=15, # how many epochs to search
    verbose=0, # how much to print
    llm_float16=True, # whether to load the model in float_16
)
--------
prompts is a list of found natural-language prompt strings

D3 (DescribeDistributionalDifferences)

from imodelsx import explain_dataset_d3
hypotheses, hypothesis_scores = explain_dataset_d3(
    pos=positive_samples, # List[str] of positive examples
    neg=negative_samples, # another List[str]
    num_steps=100,
    num_folds=2,
    batch_size=64,
)

SASC

Here, we explain a module rather than a dataset

from imodelsx import explain_module_sasc
# a toy module that responds to the length of a string
mod = lambda str_list: np.array([len(s) for s in str_list])

# a toy dataset where the longest strings are animals
text_str_list = ["red", "blue", "x", "1", "2", "hippopotamus", "elephant", "rhinoceros"]
explanation_dict = explain_module_sasc(
    text_str_list,
    mod,
    ngrams=1,
)

Aug-imodels

Use these just a like a scikit-learn model. During training, they fit better features via LLMs, but at test-time they are extremely fast and completely transparent.

from imodelsx import AugLinearClassifier, AugTreeClassifier, AugLinearRegressor, AugTreeRegressor
import datasets
import numpy as np

# set up data
dset = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['train']
dset = dset.select(np.random.choice(len(dset), size=300, replace=False))
dset_val = datasets.load_dataset('rotten_tomatoes')['validation']
dset_val = dset_val.select(np.random.choice(len(dset_val), size=300, replace=False))

# fit model
m = AugLinearClassifier(
    checkpoint='textattack/distilbert-base-uncased-rotten-tomatoes',
    ngrams=2, # use bigrams
)
m.fit(dset['text'], dset['label'])

# predict
preds = m.predict(dset_val['text'])
print('acc_val', np.mean(preds == dset_val['label']))

# interpret
print('Total ngram coefficients: ', len(m.coefs_dict_))
print('Most positive ngrams')
for k, v in sorted(m.coefs_dict_.items(), key=lambda item: item[1], reverse=True)[:8]:
    print('\t', k, round(v, 2))
print('Most negative ngrams')
for k, v in sorted(m.coefs_dict_.items(), key=lambda item: item[1])[:8]:
    print('\t', k, round(v, 2))

KAN

import imodelsx
from sklearn.datasets import make_classification, make_regression
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score
import numpy as np

X, y = make_classification(n_samples=5000, n_features=5, n_informative=3)
model = imodelsx.KANClassifier(hidden_layer_size=64, device='cpu',
                               regularize_activation=1.0, regularize_entropy=1.0)
model.fit(X, y)
y_pred = model.predict(X)
print('Test acc', accuracy_score(y, y_pred))

# now try regression
X, y = make_regression(n_samples=5000, n_features=5, n_informative=3)
model = imodelsx.kan.KANRegressor(hidden_layer_size=64, device='cpu',
                                  regularize_activation=1.0, regularize_entropy=1.0)
model.fit(X, y)
y_pred = model.predict(X)
print('Test correlation', np.corrcoef(y, y_pred.flatten())[0, 1])

General utilities

Easy baselines

Easy-to-fit baselines that follow the sklearn API.

from imodelsx import LinearFinetuneClassifier, LinearNgramClassifier
# fit a simple one-layer finetune on top of LLM embeddings
m = LinearFinetuneClassifier(
    checkpoint='distilbert-base-uncased',
)
m.fit(dset['text'], dset['label'])
preds = m.predict(dset_val['text'])
acc = (preds == dset_val['label']).mean()
print('validation acc', acc)

LLM wrapper

Easy API for calling different language models with caching (much more lightweight than langchain).

import imodelsx.llm
# supports any huggingface checkpoint or openai checkpoint (including chat models)
llm = imodelsx.llm.get_llm(
    checkpoint="gpt2-xl",  # text-davinci-003, gpt-3.5-turbo, ...
    CACHE_DIR=".cache",
)
out = llm("May the Force be")
llm("May the Force be") # when computing the same string again, uses the cache

Data wrapper

API for loading huggingface datasets with basic preprocessing.

import imodelsx.data
dset, dataset_key_text = imodelsx.data.load_huggingface_dataset('ag_news')
# Ensures that dset has a split named 'train' and 'validation',
# and that the input data is contained for each split in a column given by {dataset_key_text}

Related work

  • imodels package (JOSS 2021 github) - interpretable ML package for concise, transparent, and accurate predictive modeling (sklearn-compatible).
  • Rethinking Interpretability in the Era of Large Language Models (arXiv 2024 pdf) - overview of using LLMs to interpret datasets and yield natural-language explanations
  • Experiments in using clinical rule development: github
  • Experiments in automatically generating brain explanations: github
  • Interpretation regularization (ICML 2020 pdf, github) - penalizes CD / ACD scores during training to make models generalize better

Contributors

csinva

367 commits

jxmorris12

14 commits

arminaskari

3 commits

Languages

Python

78.8%

Jupyter Notebook

21.2%