Research Papers

This paper discusses the different roles that explicit knowledge, in particular ontologies, can play in Explainable AI and in the development of human-centric explainable systems and intelligible explanations. We consider three main perspectives in which ontologies can contribute significantly, namely reference modelling, common-sense reasoning, and knowledge refinement and complexity management. We overview some of the existing approaches in the literature, and we position them according to these three proposed perspectives. The paper concludes by discussing what challenges still need to be addressed to enable ontology-based approaches to explanation and to evaluate their human-understandability and effectiveness.

This study is focused on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence and its application in the United States, the paper highlights the impact AI has in every sector of the US economy and multiple facets of the technological space and the resultant effect on entities spanning businesses, government, academia, and civil society. There is a need for ethical considerations as these entities are beginning to depend on AI for delivering various crucial tasks, which immensely influence their operations, decision-making, and interactions with each other. The adoption of ethical principles, guidelines, and standards of work is therefore required throughout the entire process of AI development, deployment, and usage to ensure responsible and ethical AI practices. Our discussion explores eleven fundamental 'ethical principles' structured as overarching themes. These encompass Transparency, Justice, Fairness, Equity, Non- Maleficence, Responsibility, Accountability, Privacy, Beneficence, Freedom, Autonomy, Trust, Dignity, Sustainability, and Solidarity. These principles collectively serve as a guiding framework, directing the ethical path for the responsible development, deployment, and utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies across diverse sectors and entities within the United States. The paper also discusses the revolutionary impact of AI applications, such as Machine Learning, and explores various approaches used to implement AI ethics. This examination is crucial to address the growing concerns surrounding the inherent risks associated with the widespread use of artificial intelligence.

Explaining Speech Classification Models via Word-Level Audio Segments and Paralinguistic Features

Eliana Pastor, Alkis Koudounas, Giuseppe Attanasio +2

Recent advances in eXplainable AI (XAI) have provided new insights into how models for vision, language, and tabular data operate. However, few approaches exist for understanding speech models. Existing work focuses on a few spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks, and explanations are difficult to interpret for most users. We introduce a new approach to explain speech classification models. We generate easy-to-interpret explanations via input perturbation on two information levels. 1) Word-level explanations reveal how each word-related audio segment impacts the outcome. 2) Paralinguistic features (e.g., prosody and background noise) answer the counterfactual: ``What would the model prediction be if we edited the audio signal in this way?'' We validate our approach by explaining two state-of-the-art SLU models on two speech classification tasks in English and Italian. Our findings demonstrate that the explanations are faithful to the model's inner workings and plausible to humans. Our method and findings pave the way for future research on interpreting speech models.

Recent legislation proposals have significantly increased the demand for eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in many businesses, especially in so-called `high-risk' domains, such as recruitment. Within recruitment, AI has become commonplace, mainly in the form of job recommender systems (JRSs), which try to match candidates to vacancies, and vice versa. However, common XAI techniques often fall short in this domain due to the different levels and types of expertise of the individuals involved, making explanations difficult to generalize. To determine the explanation preferences of the different stakeholder types - candidates, recruiters, and companies - we created and validated a semi-structured interview guide. Using grounded theory, we structurally analyzed the results of these interviews and found that different stakeholder types indeed have strongly differing explanation preferences. Candidates indicated a preference for brief, textual explanations that allow them to quickly judge potential matches. On the other hand, hiring managers preferred visual graph-based explanations that provide a more technical and comprehensive overview at a glance. Recruiters found more exhaustive textual explanations preferable, as those provided them with more talking points to convince both parties of the match. Based on these findings, we describe guidelines on how to design an explanation interface that fulfills the requirements of all three stakeholder types. Furthermore, we provide the validated interview guide, which can assist future research in determining the explanation preferences of different stakeholder types.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated its widespread adoption in primary medical services, addressing the demand-supply imbalance in healthcare. Vision Transformers (ViT) have emerged as state-of-the-art computer vision models, benefiting from self-attention modules. However, compared to traditional machine-learning approaches, deep-learning models are complex and are often treated as a "black box" that can cause uncertainty regarding how they operate. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) refers to methods that explain and interpret machine learning models' inner workings and how they come to decisions, which is especially important in the medical domain to guide the healthcare decision-making process. This review summarises recent ViT advancements and interpretative approaches to understanding the decision-making process of ViT, enabling transparency in medical diagnosis applications.

The Responsible Development of Automated Student Feedback with Generative AI

Euan D Lindsay, Mike Zhang, Aditya Johri +1

Providing rich, constructive feedback to students is essential for supporting and enhancing their learning. Recent advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly with large language models (LLMs), present new opportunities to deliver scalable, repeatable, and instant feedback, effectively making abundant a resource that has historically been scarce and costly. From a technical perspective, this approach is now feasible due to breakthroughs in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). While the potential educational benefits are compelling, implementing these technologies also introduces a host of ethical considerations that must be thoughtfully addressed. One of the core advantages of AI systems is their ability to automate routine and mundane tasks, potentially freeing up human educators for more nuanced work. However, the ease of automation risks a ``tyranny of the majority'', where the diverse needs of minority or unique learners are overlooked, as they may be harder to systematize and less straightforward to accommodate. Ensuring inclusivity and equity in AI-generated feedback, therefore, becomes a critical aspect of responsible AI implementation in education. The process of developing machine learning models that produce valuable, personalized, and authentic feedback also requires significant input from human domain experts. Decisions around whose expertise is incorporated, how it is captured, and when it is applied have profound implications for the relevance and quality of the resulting feedback. Additionally, the maintenance and continuous refinement of these models are necessary to adapt feedback to evolving contextual, theoretical, and student-related factors. Without ongoing adaptation, feedback risks becoming obsolete or mismatched with the current needs of diverse student populations [...]

On Formal Feature Attribution and Its Approximation

Jinqiang Yu, Alexey Ignatiev, Peter J. Stuckey

Recent years have witnessed the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning (ML) models. Despite their tremendous success, a number of vital problems like ML model brittleness, their fairness, and the lack of interpretability warrant the need for the active developments in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and formal ML model verification. The two major lines of work in XAI include feature selection methods, e.g. Anchors, and feature attribution techniques, e.g. LIME and SHAP. Despite their promise, most of the existing feature selection and attribution approaches are susceptible to a range of critical issues, including explanation unsoundness and out-of-distribution sampling. A recent formal approach to XAI (FXAI) although serving as an alternative to the above and free of these issues suffers from a few other limitations. For instance and besides the scalability limitation, the formal approach is unable to tackle the feature attribution problem. Additionally, a formal explanation despite being formally sound is typically quite large, which hampers its applicability in practical settings. Motivated by the above, this paper proposes a way to apply the apparatus of formal XAI to the case of feature attribution based on formal explanation enumeration. Formal feature attribution (FFA) is argued to be advantageous over the existing methods, both formal and non-formal. Given the practical complexity of the problem, the paper then proposes an efficient technique for approximating exact FFA. Finally, it offers experimental evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed approximate FFA in comparison to the existing feature attribution algorithms not only in terms of feature importance and but also in terms of their relative order.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used in high-stakes domains of our life, increasing the need to explain these decisions and to make sure that they are aligned with how we want the decision to be made. The field of Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged in response. However, it faces a significant challenge known as the disagreement problem, where multiple explanations are possible for the same AI decision or prediction. While the existence of the disagreement problem is acknowledged, the potential implications associated with this problem have not yet been widely studied. First, we provide an overview of the different strategies explanation providers could deploy to adapt the returned explanation to their benefit. We make a distinction between strategies that attack the machine learning model or underlying data to influence the explanations, and strategies that leverage the explanation phase directly. Next, we analyse several objectives and concrete scenarios the providers could have to engage in this behavior, and the potential dangerous consequences this manipulative behavior could have on society. We emphasize that it is crucial to investigate this issue now, before these methods are widely implemented, and propose some mitigation strategies.

The field of 'explainable' artificial intelligence (XAI) has produced highly cited methods that seek to make the decisions of complex machine learning (ML) methods 'understandable' to humans, for example by attributing 'importance' scores to input features. Yet, a lack of formal underpinning leaves it unclear as to what conclusions can safely be drawn from the results of a given XAI method and has also so far hindered the theoretical verification and empirical validation of XAI methods. This means that challenging non-linear problems, typically solved by deep neural networks, presently lack appropriate remedies. Here, we craft benchmark datasets for three different non-linear classification scenarios, in which the important class-conditional features are known by design, serving as ground truth explanations. Using novel quantitative metrics, we benchmark the explanation performance of a wide set of XAI methods across three deep learning model architectures. We show that popular XAI methods are often unable to significantly outperform random performance baselines and edge detection methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that explanations derived from different model architectures can be vastly different; thus, prone to misinterpretation even under controlled conditions.

Trustworthy, responsible, ethical AI in manufacturing and supply chains: synthesis and emerging research questions

Alexandra Brintrup, George Baryannis, Ashutosh Tiwari +3

While the increased use of AI in the manufacturing sector has been widely noted, there is little understanding on the risks that it may raise in a manufacturing organisation. Although various high level frameworks and definitions have been proposed to consolidate potential risks, practitioners struggle with understanding and implementing them. This lack of understanding exposes manufacturing to a multitude of risks, including the organisation, its workers, as well as suppliers and clients. In this paper, we explore and interpret the applicability of responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI within the context of manufacturing. We then use a broadened adaptation of a machine learning lifecycle to discuss, through the use of illustrative examples, how each step may result in a given AI trustworthiness concern. We additionally propose a number of research questions to the manufacturing research community, in order to help guide future research so that the economic and societal benefits envisaged by AI in manufacturing are delivered safely and responsibly.

Evaluating the Stability of Semantic Concept Representations in CNNs for Robust Explainability

Georgii Mikriukov, Gesina Schwalbe, Christian Hellert +1

Analysis of how semantic concepts are represented within Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is a widely used approach in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for interpreting CNNs. A motivation is the need for transparency in safety-critical AI-based systems, as mandated in various domains like automated driving. However, to use the concept representations for safety-relevant purposes, like inspection or error retrieval, these must be of high quality and, in particular, stable. This paper focuses on two stability goals when working with concept representations in computer vision CNNs: stability of concept retrieval and of concept attribution. The guiding use-case is a post-hoc explainability framework for object detection (OD) CNNs, towards which existing concept analysis (CA) methods are successfully adapted. To address concept retrieval stability, we propose a novel metric that considers both concept separation and consistency, and is agnostic to layer and concept representation dimensionality. We then investigate impacts of concept abstraction level, number of concept training samples, CNN size, and concept representation dimensionality on stability. For concept attribution stability we explore the effect of gradient instability on gradient-based explainability methods. The results on various CNNs for classification and object detection yield the main findings that (1) the stability of concept retrieval can be enhanced through dimensionality reduction via data aggregation, and (2) in shallow layers where gradient instability is more pronounced, gradient smoothing techniques are advised. Finally, our approach provides valuable insights into selecting the appropriate layer and concept representation dimensionality, paving the way towards CA in safety-critical XAI applications.

The illusion of consensus occurs when people believe there is consensus across multiple sources, but the sources are the same and thus there is no "true" consensus. We explore this phenomenon in the context of an AI-based intelligent agent designed to augment metacognition on social media. Misinformation, especially on platforms like Twitter, is a global problem for which there is currently no good solution. As an explainable AI (XAI) system, the agent provides explanations for its decisions on the misinformed nature of social media content. In this late-breaking study, we explored the roles of trust (attitude) and reliance (behaviour) as key elements of XAI user experience (UX) and whether these influenced the illusion of consensus. Findings show no effect of trust, but an effect of reliance on consensus-based explanations. This work may guide the design of anti-misinformation systems that use XAI, especially the user-centred design of explanations.