The Attribution Impossibility: No Feature Ranking Is Faithful, Stable, and Complete Under Collinearity
arXiv:2605.21492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: No feature ranking can be simultaneously faithful, stable, and complete when features are collinear. For collinear pairs, ranking reduces to a coin flip. We prove this impossibility, quantify it for four model classes, resolve it via ensemble averaging (DASH), and machine-verify it with 305 Lean 4 theorems. We characterize the complete attribution design space: exactly two families of methods exist — faithful-complete methods (unstable, with rankings that flip up to 50% of the […]