Research Papers

Predicting Court Decisions for Alimony: Avoiding Extra-legal Factors in Decision made by Judges and Not Understandable AI Models

Fabrice Muhlenbach, Long Nguyen Phuoc, Isabelle Sayn

The advent of machine learning techniques has made it possible to obtain predictive systems that have overturned traditional legal practices. However, rather than leading to systems seeking to replace humans, the search for the determinants in a court decision makes it possible to give a better understanding of the decision mechanisms carried out by the judge. By using a large amount of court decisions in matters of divorce produced by French jurisdictions and by looking at the variables that allow to allocate an alimony or not, and to define its amount, we seek to identify if there may be extra-legal factors in the decisions taken by the judges. From this perspective, we present an explainable AI model designed in this purpose by combining a classification with random forest and a regression model, as a complementary tool to existing decision-making scales or guidelines created by practitioners.

The field of transparent Machine Learning (ML) has contributed many novel methods aiming at better interpretability for computer vision and ML models in general. But how useful the explanations provided by transparent ML methods are for humans remains difficult to assess. Most studies evaluate interpretability in qualitative comparisons, they use experimental paradigms that do not allow for direct comparisons amongst methods or they report only offline experiments with no humans in the loop. While there are clear advantages of evaluations with no humans in the loop, such as scalability, reproducibility and less algorithmic bias than with humans in the loop, these metrics are limited in their usefulness if we do not understand how they relate to other metrics that take human cognition into account. Here we investigate the quality of interpretable computer vision algorithms using techniques from psychophysics. In crowdsourced annotation tasks we study the impact of different interpretability approaches on annotation accuracy and task time. In order to relate these findings to quality measures for interpretability without humans in the loop we compare quality metrics with and without humans in the loop. Our results demonstrate that psychophysical experiments allow for robust quality assessment of transparency in machine learning. Interestingly the quality metrics computed without humans in the loop did not provide a consistent ranking of interpretability methods nor were they representative for how useful an explanation was for humans. These findings highlight the potential of methods from classical psychophysics for modern machine learning applications. We hope that our results provide convincing arguments for evaluating interpretability in its natural habitat, human-ML interaction, if the goal is to obtain an authentic assessment of interpretability.

Neural network interpretability is a vital component for applications across a wide variety of domains. In such cases it is often useful to analyze a network which has already been trained for its specific purpose. In this work, we develop a method to produce explanation masks for pre-trained networks. The mask localizes the most important aspects of each input for prediction of the original network. Masks are created by a secondary network whose goal is to create as small an explanation as possible while still preserving the predictive accuracy of the original network. We demonstrate the applicability of our method for image classification with CNNs, sentiment analysis with RNNs, and chemical property prediction with mixed CNN/RNN architectures.

Deep Neural Network based classifiers are known to be vulnerable to perturbations of inputs constructed by an adversarial attack to force misclassification. Most studies have focused on how to make vulnerable noise by gradient based attack methods or to defense model from adversarial attack. The use of the denoiser model is one of a well-known solution to reduce the adversarial noise although classification performance had not significantly improved. In this study, we aim to analyze the propagation of adversarial attack as an explainable AI(XAI) point of view. Specifically, we examine the trend of adversarial perturbations through the CNN architectures. To analyze the propagated perturbation, we measured normalized Euclidean Distance and cosine distance in each CNN layer between the feature map of the perturbed image passed through denoiser and the non-perturbed original image. We used five well-known CNN based classifiers and three gradient-based adversarial attacks. From the experimental results, we observed that in most cases, Euclidean Distance explosively increases in the final fully connected layer while cosine distance fluctuated and disappeared at the last layer. This means that the use of denoiser can decrease the amount of noise. However, it failed to defense accuracy degradation.

Most explainable AI (XAI) techniques are concerned with the design of algorithms to explain the AI's decision. However, the data that is used to train these algorithms may contain features that are often incomprehensible to an end-user even with the best XAI algorithms. Thus, the problem of explainability has to be addressed starting right from the data creation step. In this paper, we studied this problem considering the use-case of explaining loan denials to end-users as opposed to AI engineers or domain experts. Motivated by the lack of datasets that are representative of user-friendly explanations, we build the first-of-its-kind dataset that is representative of user-friendly explanations for loan denials. The paper shares some of the insights gained in curating the dataset. First, existing datasets seldom contain features that end users consider as acceptable in understanding a model's decision. Second, understanding of the explanation's context such as the human-in-the-loop seeking the explanation, and the purpose for which an explanation is sought, aids in the creation of user-friendly datasets. Thus, our dataset, which we call Xnet, also contains explanations that serve different purposes: those that educate the loan applicants, and help them take appropriate action towards a future approval. We hope this work will trigger the creation of new user friendly datasets, and serve as a guide for the curation of such datasets.

Understanding how cities visually differ from each others is interesting for planners, residents, and historians. We investigate the interpretation of deep features learned by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for city recognition. Given a trained city recognition network, we first generate weighted masks using the known Grad-CAM technique and to select the most discriminate regions in the image. Since the image classification label is the city name, it contains no information of objects that are class-discriminate, we investigate the interpretability of deep representations with two methods. (i) Unsupervised method is used to cluster the objects appearing in the visual explanations. (ii) A pretrained semantic segmentation model is used to label objects in pixel level, and then we introduce statistical measures to quantitatively evaluate the interpretability of discriminate objects. The influence of network architectures and random initializations in training, is studied on the interpretability of CNN features for city recognition. The results suggest that network architectures would affect the interpretability of learned visual representations greater than different initializations.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have a high accuracy on image classification tasks. However, DNNs trained by such dataset with co-occurrence bias may rely on wrong features while making decisions for classification. It will greatly affect the transferability of pre-trained DNNs. In this paper, we propose an interactive method to direct classifiers paying attentions to the regions that are manually specified by the users, in order to mitigate the influence of co-occurrence bias. We test on CelebA dataset, the pre-trained AlexNet is fine-tuned to focus on the specific facial attributes based on the results of Grad-CAM.

Emergence of Addictive Behaviors in Reinforcement Learning Agents

Vahid Behzadan, Roman V. Yampolskiy, Arslan Munir

This paper presents a novel approach to the technical analysis of wireheading in intelligent agents. Inspired by the natural analogues of wireheading and their prevalent manifestations, we propose the modeling of such phenomenon in Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents as psychological disorders. In a preliminary step towards evaluating this proposal, we study the feasibility and dynamics of emergent addictive policies in Q-learning agents in the tractable environment of the game of Snake. We consider a slightly modified settings for this game, in which the environment provides a "drug" seed alongside the original "healthy" seed for the consumption of the snake. We adopt and extend an RL-based model of natural addiction to Q-learning agents in this settings, and derive sufficient parametric conditions for the emergence of addictive behaviors in such agents. Furthermore, we evaluate our theoretical analysis with three sets of simulation-based experiments. The results demonstrate the feasibility of addictive wireheading in RL agents, and provide promising venues of further research on the psychopathological modeling of complex AI safety problems.

The paper introduces the ante-hoc Explainable AI methodology to assess the global feature importance of the Machine Learning models used for heat demand forecasting in intelligent control of District Heating Systems, with motivation to facilitate their interpretability and trustworthiness, hence addressing the challenges related to adherence to communal standards, customer satisfaction and liability risks. Methodology includes use of four different approaches, namely intrinsic interpretability of Gradient Boosting method and selected post-hoc methods, namely Partial Dependence, Accumulated Local Effects and SHAP. None of the selected methods assume feature permutation or perturbations which can introduce bias due to introduction of random unrealistic values of data instances. Discussion of results is provided, including the assessment of complementarities where applicable, with specific interpretations in context of the district heating processes.

Explaining and understanding the decision-making process of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly those implemented by neural networks, falls within the field of explainable AI (XAI). Analogous to the human attention mechanism, neural networks are assumed to possess their own attention mechanisms that selectively process information during decision-making. This work proposes to study one XAI topic: analysing and visualising the attention mechanisms of neural networks. Our experiments are performed on speaker recognition neural networks that are trained to identify speaker identity from a given utterance. Previous studies have widely used class activation map (CAM)-based methods to analyse and visualise the attention mechanisms of neural networks. Each of these methods produces an attention map for each network input, highlighting which input regions are selectively processed when the speaker recognition network makes decisions. However, the evaluation of attention maps produced by these methods remains largely underexplored. This work systematically reviews an existing attention map evaluation algorithm, establishing key concepts and identifying its shortcomings. On the basis of this existing evaluation algorithm, a new version is then proposed to address the identified shortcomings, called the Modified Randomised Input Sampling for Explanation - Evaluation algorithm (Modified RISE-eval). Using Modified RISE-eval, we evaluate the attention maps produced by two representative CAM-based methods, GradCAM and LayerCAM, applied to a certain speaker recognition network. The evaluation results demonstrate that GradCAM and LayerCAM each exhibit distinct advantages when applied under different experimental conditions in the speaker recognition task.

Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

Ravi Ranjan, Utkarsh Grover, Xiaomin Lin +1

Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into critical infrastructure including healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, offers transformative benefits but also conflicts with evolving regulatory and governance frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the challenges of balancing AI compliance and technological innovation across critical infrastructure sectors. The review follows established SLR guidelines to extract and synthesize insights from peer-reviewed articles, report, and institutional sources published between 2020-2025. The study identifies three interrelated challenges: fragmented regulations, excessive compliance burdens for smaller to medium enterprises (SMEs), and misaligned governance models. To address these challenges, the study highlights practical governance strategies, including risk-tiered regulation, compliance by design, and explainable AI, to support scalable and trustworthy AI deployment in critical sectors. Key contributions include a concise mapping of core AI-governance challenges and a conceptual diagram illustrating their overlap, as well as actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioner to harmonize oversight with innovation.