Research Papers

This study offers an in-depth analysis of the application and implications of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's AI Risk Management Framework (NIST AI RMF) within the domain of surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition technology. Given the inherently high-risk and consequential nature of facial recognition systems, our research emphasizes the critical need for a structured approach to risk management in this sector. The paper presents a detailed case study demonstrating the utility of the NIST AI RMF in identifying and mitigating risks that might otherwise remain unnoticed in these technologies. Our primary objective is to develop a comprehensive risk management strategy that advances the practice of responsible AI utilization in feasible, scalable ways. We propose a six-step process tailored to the specific challenges of surveillance technology that aims to produce a more systematic and effective risk management practice. This process emphasizes continual assessment and improvement to facilitate companies in managing AI-related risks more robustly and ensuring ethical and responsible deployment of AI systems. Additionally, our analysis uncovers and discusses critical gaps in the current framework of the NIST AI RMF, particularly concerning its application to surveillance technologies. These insights contribute to the evolving discourse on AI governance and risk management, highlighting areas for future refinement and development in frameworks like the NIST AI RMF.

Genetic programming (GP) has the potential to generate explainable results, especially when used for dimensionality reduction. In this research, we investigate the potential of leveraging eXplainable AI (XAI) and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to improve the interpretability of GP-based non-linear dimensionality reduction. Our study introduces a novel XAI dashboard named GP4NLDR, the first approach to combine state-of-the-art GP with an LLM-powered chatbot to provide comprehensive, user-centred explanations. We showcase the system's ability to provide intuitive and insightful narratives on high-dimensional data reduction processes through case studies. Our study highlights the importance of prompt engineering in eliciting accurate and pertinent responses from LLMs. We also address important considerations around data privacy, hallucinatory outputs, and the rapid advancements in generative AI. Our findings demonstrate its potential in advancing the explainability of GP algorithms. This opens the door for future research into explaining GP models with LLMs.

The opacity of AI models necessitates both validation and evaluation before their integration into services. To investigate these models, explainable AI (XAI) employs methods that elucidate the relationship between input features and output predictions. The operations of XAI extend beyond the execution of a single algorithm, involving a series of activities that include preprocessing data, adjusting XAI to align with model parameters, invoking the model to generate predictions, and summarizing the XAI results. Adversarial attacks are well-known threats that aim to mislead AI models. The assessment complexity, especially for XAI, increases when open-source AI models are subject to adversarial attacks, due to various combinations. To automate the numerous entities and tasks involved in XAI-based assessments, we propose a cloud-based service framework that encapsulates computing components as microservices and organizes assessment tasks into pipelines. The current XAI tools are not inherently service-oriented. This framework also integrates open XAI tool libraries as part of the pipeline composition. We demonstrate the application of XAI services for assessing five quality attributes of AI models: (1) computational cost, (2) performance, (3) robustness, (4) explanation deviation, and (5) explanation resilience across computer vision and tabular cases. The service framework generates aggregated analysis that showcases the quality attributes for more than a hundred combination scenarios.

The increasing reliance on complex algorithmic systems by online platforms has sparked a growing need for algorithm auditing, a methodology evaluating these systems' functionality and impact. In this paper, we systematically review 176 peer-reviewed online platform-focused algorithm auditing studies and identify trends in their methodological approaches, the geographic distribution of authors, and the selection of platforms, languages, geographies, and group-based attributes in the focus of the reviewed research. We find a significant skew of research focus towards few online platforms, Western contexts, particularly the US, and English language data. Additionally, our analysis indicates a tendency to focus on a narrow set of group-based attributes, often operationalized in simplified ways, which might obscure more nuanced aspects of algorithmic bias and discrimination. We provide a clearer understanding of the current state of the online platform-focused algorithm auditing and identify gaps to be addressed for a more inclusive and representative research landscape.

EXplainable AI has received significant attention in recent years. Machine learning models often operate as black boxes, lacking explainability and transparency while supporting decision-making processes. Local post-hoc explainability queries attempt to answer why individual inputs are classified in a certain way by a given model. While there has been important work on counterfactual explanations, less attention has been devoted to semifactual ones. In this paper, we focus on local post-hoc explainability queries within the semifactual `even-if' thinking and their computational complexity among different classes of models, and show that both linear and tree-based models are strictly more interpretable than neural networks. After this, we introduce a preference-based framework that enables users to personalize explanations based on their preferences, both in the case of semifactuals and counterfactuals, enhancing interpretability and user-centricity. Finally, we explore the complexity of several interpretability problems in the proposed preference-based framework and provide algorithms for polynomial cases.

With the rise of individual and collaborative networks of autonomous agents, AI is deployed in more key reasoning and decision-making roles. For this reason, ethics-based audits play a pivotal role in the rapidly growing fields of AI safety and regulation. This paper undertakes an ethics-based audit to probe the 8 leading commercial and open-source Large Language Models including GPT-4. We assess explicability and trustworthiness by a) establishing how well different models engage in moral reasoning and b) comparing normative values underlying models as ethical frameworks. We employ an experimental, evidence-based approach that challenges the models with ethical dilemmas in order to probe human-AI alignment. The ethical scenarios are designed to require a decision in which the particulars of the situation may or may not necessitate deviating from normative ethical principles. A sophisticated ethical framework was consistently elicited in one model, GPT-4. Nonetheless, troubling findings include underlying normative frameworks with clear bias towards particular cultural norms. Many models also exhibit disturbing authoritarian tendencies. Code is available at https://github.com/jonchun/llm-sota-chatbots-ethics-based-audit.

This paper explores the dynamic landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in Africa, analysing its varied applications in addressing socio-economic challenges and fostering development. Examining the African AI ecosystem, the study considers regional nuances, cultural factors, and infrastructural constraints shaping the deployment of AI solutions. Case studies in healthcare, agriculture, finance, and education highlight AI's transformative potential for efficiency, accessibility, and inclusivity. The paper emphasizes indigenous AI innovations and international collaborations contributing to a distinct African AI ecosystem. Ethical considerations, including data privacy and algorithmic bias, are addressed alongside policy frameworks supporting responsible AI implementation. The role of governmental bodies, regulations, and private sector partnerships is explored in creating a conducive AI development environment. Challenges such as digital literacy gaps and job displacement are discussed, with proposed strategies for mitigation. In conclusion, the paper provides a nuanced understanding of AI in Africa, contributing to sustainable development discussions and advocating for an inclusive and ethical AI ecosystem on the continent.

Memes have become a distinctive and effective form of communication in the digital era, attracting online communities and cutting across cultural barriers. Even though memes are frequently linked with humor, they have an amazing capacity to convey a wide range of emotions, including happiness, sarcasm, frustration, and more. Understanding and interpreting the sentiment underlying memes has become crucial in the age of information. Previous research has explored text-based, image-based, and multimodal approaches, leading to the development of models like CAPSAN and PromptHate for detecting various meme categories. However, the study of low-resource languages like Bengali memes remains scarce, with limited availability of publicly accessible datasets. A recent contribution includes the introduction of the MemoSen dataset. However, the achieved accuracy is notably low, and the dataset suffers from imbalanced distribution. In this study, we employed a multimodal approach using ResNet50 and BanglishBERT and achieved a satisfactory result of 0.71 weighted F1-score, performed comparison with unimodal approaches, and interpreted behaviors of the models using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques.

When individuals are subject to adverse outcomes from machine learning models, providing a recourse path to help achieve a positive outcome is desirable. Recent work has shown that counterfactual explanations - which can be used as a means of single-step recourse - are vulnerable to privacy issues, putting an individuals' privacy at risk. Providing a sequential multi-step path for recourse can amplify this risk. Furthermore, simply adding noise to recourse paths found from existing methods can impact the realism and actionability of the path for an end-user. In this work, we address privacy issues when generating realistic recourse paths based on instance-based counterfactual explanations, and provide PrivRecourse: an end-to-end privacy preserving pipeline that can provide realistic recourse paths. PrivRecourse uses differentially private (DP) clustering to represent non-overlapping subsets of the private dataset. These DP cluster centers are then used to generate recourse paths by forming a graph with cluster centers as the nodes, so that we can generate realistic - feasible and actionable - recourse paths. We empirically evaluate our approach on finance datasets and compare it to simply adding noise to data instances, and to using DP synthetic data, to generate the graph. We observe that PrivRecourse can provide paths that are private and realistic.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is an emerging field in AI that aims to address the opaque nature of machine learning models. Furthermore, it has been shown that XAI can be used to extract input-output relationships, making them a useful tool in chemistry to understand structure-property relationships. However, one of the main limitations of XAI methods is that they are developed for technically oriented users. We propose the XpertAI framework that integrates XAI methods with large language models (LLMs) accessing scientific literature to generate accessible natural language explanations of raw chemical data automatically. We conducted 5 case studies to evaluate the performance of XpertAI. Our results show that XpertAI combines the strengths of LLMs and XAI tools in generating specific, scientific, and interpretable explanations.

Recent technological advancements have led to a large number of patents in a diverse range of domains, making it challenging for human experts to analyze and manage. State-of-the-art methods for multi-label patent classification rely on deep neural networks (DNNs), which are complex and often considered black-boxes due to their opaque decision-making processes. In this paper, we propose a novel deep explainable patent classification framework by introducing layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) to provide human-understandable explanations for predictions. We train several DNN models, including Bi-LSTM, CNN, and CNN-BiLSTM, and propagate the predictions backward from the output layer up to the input layer of the model to identify the relevance of words for individual predictions. Considering the relevance score, we then generate explanations by visualizing relevant words for the predicted patent class. Experimental results on two datasets comprising two-million patent texts demonstrate high performance in terms of various evaluation measures. The explanations generated for each prediction highlight important relevant words that align with the predicted class, making the prediction more understandable. Explainable systems have the potential to facilitate the adoption of complex AI-enabled methods for patent classification in real-world applications.

Financial cybercrime prevention is an increasing issue with many organisations and governments. As deep learning models have progressed to identify illicit activity on various financial and social networks, the explainability behind the model decisions has been lacklustre with the investigative analyst at the heart of any deep learning platform. In our paper, we present a state-of-the-art, novel multimodal proactive approach to addressing XAI in financial cybercrime detection. We leverage a triad of deep learning models designed to distill essential representations from transaction sequencing, subgraph connectivity, and narrative generation to significantly streamline the analyst's investigative process. Our narrative generation proposal leverages LLM to ingest transaction details and output contextual narrative for an analyst to understand a transaction and its metadata much further.