What is DeepSeek's policy on AI explainability?

DeepSeek prioritizes AI explainability by implementing practices that make model behavior transparent to developers. The company focuses on providing clear insights into how models generate outputs, enabling technical teams to diagnose issues, improve performance, and meet compliance requirements. This approach centers on using interpretable architectures, standardized documentation, and tools that reveal decision-making pathways without requiring deep expertise in model internals. For example, DeepSeek might deploy techniques like attention visualization in transformer models or feature importance scoring in gradient-boosted trees to show which inputs most influenced a prediction.

To operationalize explainability, DeepSeek integrates analysis tools directly into development workflows. Developers can access model-agnostic explainers—such as LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) or SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations)—through APIs or libraries compatible with common frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow. These tools generate instance-level explanations, such as highlighting specific words in a text input that triggered a classification decision. The company also enforces documentation standards that require teams to log training data sources, hyperparameters, and evaluation metrics, creating an audit trail. For instance, a fraud detection model might include a report detailing how transaction amount, location, and user history collectively contribute to risk scores.

DeepSeek encourages proactive explainability testing through collaboration between developers and domain experts. Teams might run “sanity check” scenarios where they feed controlled inputs into models to verify outputs align with expected reasoning. In a customer service chatbot, this could involve testing how the model handles ambiguous queries and verifying that fallback mechanisms activate appropriately. The company also supports modular system design, allowing developers to isolate and inspect components like preprocessing steps or post-processing rules. By combining technical tools with process rigor, DeepSeek aims to balance performance with the ability to answer the critical question: “Why did the model make this decision?” in terms developers can act on.