Intro

Hello, welcome to my website. I am a second-year PhD student in Interpretability for Natural Language Processing models. I do my PhD between the IRT Saint Exupéry and the IRIT, both in Toulouse France. I am under the supervision of Pr. Nicholas Asher, Pr. Philippe Muller, and Dr. Fanny Jourdan.

Core maintainer of the Interpreto and Xplique open-source libraries. My goal is to provide easy access to useful explanations.

Research

The goal of my PhD is to build an interpretability agent (conversational explainability) for language models. However, I find that the quality and consistency of explanations are lacking, in particular with concept-based explanations.

Which is why I currently work on improving such explanations. Notably, the first publication of my PhD, ConSim (Poché et al. ACL 2025), aims at evaluating the usefulness of concept-based explanations in NLP.

The future directions I would like to explore are:

  • Improving the interpretation of concept-based explanations.
  • Building contrastive concept-based explanations.
  • Example-based explanations for language models.

If these subjects are of interest to you, feel free to contact me, I would be happy to collaborate.

News

Software

🪄 Interpreto: An Explainability Library for Transformers

Antonin Poché*, Thomas Mullor, Gabriele Sarti, Frédéric Boisnard, Corentin Friedrich, Charlotte Claye, François Hoofd, Raphael Bernas, Céline Hudelot, Fanny Jourdan*

2025 · Open-source library

Interpreto is a Python library for post hoc explainability of text HuggingFace models, from early BERT variants to LLMs. It provides two complementary families of methods: attributions and concept-based explanations. The library connects recent research to practical tooling for data scientists, aiming to make explanations accessible to end users. It includes documentation, examples, and tutorials. Interpreto supports both classification and generation models through a unified API. A key differentiator is its concept-based functionality, which goes beyond feature-level attributions and is uncommon in existing libraries.

Xplique: Explainability Toolbox for Neural Networks

Thomas Fel, Lucas Hervier, Antonin Poche, David Vigouroux, Justin Plakoo, Remi Cadene, Mathieu Chalvidal, Julien Colin, Thibaut Boissin, Louis Bethune, Agustin Picard, Claire Nicodeme, Laurent Gardes, Gregory Flandin, Thomas Serre

2022 · Workshop on Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Computer Vision (CVPR)

Xplique (pronounced \ɛks.plik\) is a Python toolkit dedicated to explainability. The goal of this library is to gather the state of the art of Explainable AI to help you understand your complex neural network models. Originally built for Tensorflow's model it also works for PyTorch models partially. The library is composed of several modules, the Attributions Methods module implements various methods (e.g Saliency, Grad-CAM, Integrated-Gradients...), with explanations, examples and links to official papers. The Feature Visualization module allows to see how neural networks build their understanding of images by finding inputs that maximize neurons, channels, layers or compositions of these elements. The Concepts module allows you to extract human concepts from a model and to test their usefulness with respect to a class. Finally, the Metrics module covers the current metrics used in explainability. Used in conjunction with the Attribution Methods module, it allows you to test the different methods or evaluate the explanations of a model.

Publications

ConSim: Measuring Concept-Based Explanations’ Effectiveness with Automated Simulatability

Antonin Poché, Alon Jacovi, Agustin Martin Picard, Victor Boutin, and Fanny Jourdan.

2025 · ACL

ConSim is a metric for concept-based explanations based on simulatability and user-llms. It shows consistent methods ranking across datasets, models, and user-llms. Furthermore, it correlates with faithfulness and complexity.

Natural Example-Based Explainability: a Survey

Antonin Poché*, Lucas Hervier∗, and Mohamed-Chafik Bakkay

2023 · xAI (World Conference on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence)

Guidelines to explain machine learning algorithms

Frédéric Boisnard, Ryma Boumazouza, Mélanie Ducoffe, Thomas Fel, Estèle Glize, Lucas Hervier, Vincent Mussot, Agustin Martin Picard, Antonin Poché, and David Vigouroux

2023 · Arxiv

Posters

Teaching

Placeholder teaching section.