cs.AIJul 27, 2026

MiSS: A Logic-Driven Explanation of Minimal Sufficient Coalitions for Point Cloud Classifiers

Authors: Mengda XingJean-Marie Lagniez

Organizations: UA, CRIL · CRIL, Univ. Artois, Lens, France

Abstract

We present MiSS, a black-box, query-based framework for explaining 3D point cloud classifiers through perturbation-relative sufficiency reasoning. MiSS treats a superpoint partition as an interpretable abstraction layer and asks whether the original prediction can be certified from a minimal coalition of geometric regions under a specified perturbation distribution. Unlike abductive explainers that require Boolean feature spaces or white-box logical encodings of the predictor, MiSS separates candidate proposal from verification: a weighted MaxSAT procedure proposes coalitions using a heuristic adaptive cardinality floor, certified exact-size fallback, a safely tightened upper bound, blocking clauses, and a surrogate acquisition heuristic learned from previous oracle evaluations, while a blackbox statistical oracle decides sufficiency from prediction queries. The system returns a statistically verified sufficient coalition as a binary attribution, with minimum cardinality guaranteed when certified search completes. Experiments on ModelNet40 and ShapeNet with PointNet and PointMLP classifiers show higher precision and coverage than rule-based baselines in most settings, with lower explanation time than exhaustive search.

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