Saving and loading

Alibi includes experimental support for saving and loading a subset of explainers to disk using the dill module.

To save an explainer, simply call the save method and provide a path to a directory (a new one will be created if it doesn't exist):

explainer.save('path')

Alibi doesn't save the model/prediction function that is passed into the explainer so when loading the explainer you will need to provide it again:

from alibi.saving import load_explainer
explainer = load_explainer('path', predictor=predictor)

Details and limitations

Every explainer will save the following artifacts as a minimum:

path/meta.dill
path/explainer.dill

Here meta.dill is the metadata of the explainer (including the Alibi version used to create it) and explainer.dill is the serialized explainer. Some explainers may save more artifacts, e.g. AnchorText additionally saves path/nlp which is the spacy model used to initialize the explainer using the native spacy saving functionality (pickle based) whilst AnchorImage also saves the custom Python segmentation function under path/segmentation_fn.dill.

When loading a saved explainer, a warning will be issued if the runtime Alibi version is different from the version used to save the explainer. It is highly recommended to use the same Alibi, Python and dependency versions as were used to save the explainer to avoid potential bugs and incompatibilities.