Research Papers

Current Explainable AI (XAI) focuses on explaining a single application, but when encountering related applications, users may rely on their prior understanding from previous explanations. This leads to either overgeneralization and AI overreliance, or burdensome independent memorization. Indeed, related decision tasks can share explanatory factors, but with some notable differences; e.g., body mass index (BMI) affects the risks for heart disease and diabetes at the same rate, but chest pain is more indicative of heart disease. Similarly, models using different attributes for the same task still share signals; e.g., temperature and pressure affect air pollution but in opposite directions due to the ideal gas law. Leveraging transfer of learning, we propose Transferable XAI to enable users to transfer understanding across related domains by explaining the relationship between domain explanations using a general affine transformation framework applied to linear factor explanations. The framework supports explanation transfer across various domain types: translation for data subspace (subsuming prior work on Incremental XAI), scaling for decision task, and mapping for attributes. Focusing on task and attributes domain types, in formative and summative user studies, we investigated how well participants could understand AI decisions from one domain to another. Compared to single-domain and domain-independent explanations, Transferable XAI was the most helpful for understanding the second domain, leading to the best decision faithfulness, factor recall, and ability to relate explanations between domains. This framework contributes to improving the reusability of explanations across related AI applications by explaining factor relationships between subspaces, tasks, and attributes.

Explaining with examples is an intuitive way to justify AI decisions. However, it is challenging to understand how a decision value should change relative to the examples with many features differing by large amounts. We draw from real estate valuation that uses Comparables-examples with known values for comparison. Estimates are made more accurate by hypothetically adjusting the attributes of each Comparable and correspondingly changing the value based on factors. We propose Comparables XAI for relatable example-based explanations of AI with Trace adjustments that trace counterfactual changes from each Comparable to the Subject, one attribute at a time, monotonically along the AI feature space. In modelling and user studies, Trace-adjusted Comparables achieved the highest XAI faithfulness and precision, user accuracy, and narrowest uncertainty bounds compared to linear regression, linearly adjusted Comparables, or unadjusted Comparables. This work contributes a new analytical basis for using example-based explanations to improve user understanding of AI decisions.

While Explainable AI (XAI) helps users understand AI decisions, misalignment in domain knowledge can lead to disagreement. This inconsistency hinders understanding, and because explanations are often read-only, users lack the control to improve alignment. We propose making XAI editable, allowing users to write rules to improve control and gain deeper understanding through the generation effect of active learning. We developed CoExplain, leveraging a neural network for universal representation and symbolic rules for intuitive reasoning on interpretable attributes. CoExplain explains the neural network with a faithful proxy decision tree, parses user-written rules as an equivalent neural network graph, and collaboratively optimizes the decision tree. In a user study (N=43), CoExplain and manually editable XAI improved user understanding and model alignment compared to read-only XAI. CoExplain was easier to use with fewer edits and less time. This work contributes Editable XAI for bidirectional AI alignment, improving understanding and control.

Deep learning has significantly improved time series classification, yet the lack of explainability in these models remains a major challenge. While Explainable AI (XAI) techniques aim to make model decisions more transparent, their effectiveness is often hindered by the high dimensionality and noise present in raw time series data. In this work, we investigate whether transforming time series into discrete latent representations-using methods such as Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE) and Discrete Variational Autoencoders (DVAE)-not only preserves but enhances explainability by reducing redundancy and focusing on the most informative patterns. We show that applying XAI methods to these compressed representations leads to concise and structured explanations that maintain faithfulness without sacrificing classification performance. Additionally, we propose Similar Subsequence Accuracy (SSA), a novel metric that quantitatively assesses the alignment between XAI-identified salient subsequences and the label distribution in the training data. SSA provides a systematic way to validate whether the features highlighted by XAI methods are truly representative of the learned classification patterns. Our findings demonstrate that discrete latent representations not only retain the essential characteristics needed for classification but also offer a pathway to more compact, interpretable, and computationally efficient explanations in time series analysis.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in image classification, yet their attention mechanisms often remain opaque and exhibit dense, non-structured behaviors. In this work, we adapt our previously proposed SVD-Inspired Attention (SVDA) mechanism to the ViT architecture, introducing a geometrically grounded formulation that enhances interpretability, sparsity, and spectral structure. We apply the use of interpretability indicators -- originally proposed with SVDA -- to monitor attention dynamics during training and assess structural properties of the learned representations. Experimental evaluations on four widely used benchmarks -- CIFAR-10, FashionMNIST, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-100 -- demonstrate that SVDA consistently yields more interpretable attention patterns without sacrificing classification accuracy. While the current framework offers descriptive insights rather than prescriptive guidance, our results establish SVDA as a comprehensive and informative tool for analyzing and developing structured attention models in computer vision. This work lays the foundation for future advances in explainable AI, spectral diagnostics, and attention-based model compression.

Data privacy and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) are two important aspects for modern Machine Learning systems. To enhance data privacy, recent machine learning models have been designed as a Federated Learning (FL) system. On top of that, additional privacy layers can be added, via Differential Privacy (DP). On the other hand, to improve explainability, ML must consider more interpretable approaches with reduced number of features and less complex internal architecture. In this context, this paper aims to achieve a machine learning (ML) model that combines enhanced data privacy with explainability. So, we propose a FL solution, called Federated EXplainable Trees with Differential Privacy (FEXT-DP), that: (i) is based on Decision Trees, since they are lightweight and have superior explainability than neural networks-based FL systems; (ii) provides additional layer of data privacy protection applying Differential Privacy (DP) to the Tree-Based model. However, there is a side effect adding DP: it harms the explainability of the system. So, this paper also presents the impact of DP protection on the explainability of the ML model, analyzing the obtained results for SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) and Mean Decrease in Impurity (MDI).

The evaluation of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods is a rapidly growing field, characterized by a wide variety of approaches. This diversity highlights the complexity of the XAI evaluation, which, unlike traditional AI assessment, lacks a universally correct ground truth for the explanation, making objective evaluation challenging. One promising direction to address this issue involves the use of what we term Synthetic Artificial Intelligence Ground truth (SAIG) methods, which generate artificial ground truths to enable the direct evaluation of XAI techniques. This paper presents the first review and analysis of SAIG methods. We introduce a novel taxonomy to classify these approaches, identifying seven key features that distinguish different SAIG methods. Our comparative study reveals a concerning lack of consensus on the most effective XAI evaluation techniques, underscoring the need for further research and standardization in this area.

Open Source Software (OSS) projects follow diverse lifecycle trajectories shaped by evolving patterns of contribution, coordination, and community engagement. Understanding these trajectories is essential for stakeholders seeking to assess project organization and health at scale. However, prior work has largely relied on static or aggregated metrics, such as project age or cumulative activity, providing limited insight into how OSS sustainability unfolds over time. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical predictive framework that models OSS projects as belonging to distinct lifecycle stages grounded in established socio-technical categorizations of OSS development. Rather than treating sustainability solely as project longevity, these lifecycle stages operationalize sustainability as a multidimensional construct integrating contribution activity, community participation, and maintenance dynamics. The framework combines engineered tabular indicators with 24-month temporal activity sequences and employs a multi-stage classification pipeline to distinguish lifecycle stages associated with different coordination and participation regimes. To support transparency, we incorporate explainable AI techniques to examine the relative contribution of feature categories to model predictions. Evaluated on a large corpus of OSS repositories, the proposed approach achieves over 94\% overall accuracy in lifecycle stage classification. Attribution analyses consistently identify contribution activity and community-related features as dominant signals, highlighting the central role of collective participation dynamics.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide transparent insights into machine learning models, yet the reliability of many feature attribution methods remains a critical challenge. Prior research (Haufe et al., 2014; Wilming et al., 2022, 2023) has demonstrated that these methods often erroneously assign significant importance to non-informative variables, such as suppressor variables, leading to fundamental misinterpretations. Since statistical suppression is induced by feature dependencies, this study investigates whether data whitening, a common preprocessing technique for decorrelation, can mitigate such errors. Using the established XAI-TRIS benchmark (Clark et al., 2024b), which offers synthetic ground-truth data and quantitative measures of explanation correctness, we empirically evaluate 16 popular feature attribution methods applied in combination with 5 distinct whitening transforms. Additionally, we analyze a minimal linear two-dimensional classification problem (Wilming et al., 2023) to theoretically assess whether whitening can remove the impact of suppressor features from Bayes-optimal models. Our results indicate that, while specific whitening techniques can improve explanation performance, the degree of improvement varies substantially across XAI methods and model architectures. These findings highlight the complex relationship between data non-linearities, preprocessing quality, and attribution fidelity, underscoring the vital role of pre-processing techniques in enhancing model interpretability.

Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly deployed in cybersecurity applications such as phishing detection and network intrusion prevention. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations small, deliberate input modifications that can degrade detection accuracy and compromise interpretability. This paper presents an empirical study of adversarial robustness and explainability drift across two cybersecurity domains phishing URL classification and network intrusion detection. We evaluate the impact of L (infinity) bounded Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) perturbations on model accuracy and introduce a quantitative metric, the Robustness Index (RI), defined as the area under the accuracy perturbation curve. Gradient based feature sensitivity and SHAP based attribution drift analyses reveal which input features are most susceptible to adversarial manipulation. Experiments on the Phishing Websites and UNSW NB15 datasets show consistent robustness trends, with adversarial training improving RI by up to 9 percent while maintaining clean-data accuracy. These findings highlight the coupling between robustness and interpretability degradation and underscore the importance of quantitative evaluation in the design of trustworthy, AI-driven cybersecurity systems.

As AI systems increasingly become embedded in interactive and im-mersive artistic environments, artists and technologists are discovering new opportunities to engage with their interpretive and autonomous capacities as creative collaborators in live performance. The focus of this work-in-progress is on outlining conceptual and technical foundations under which performance-makers and interactive architecture can collaborate within rehearsal settings. It introduces a rehearsal-oriented prototype system for shaping and testing AI-mediated environments within creative practice. This approach treats interactive architecture as a performative agent that senses spatial behaviour and speech, interprets these signals through a large language model, and generates real-time environmental adaptations. Designed for deployment in physical performance spaces, the system employs virtual blueprints to support iterative experimentation and creative dialogue between artists and AI agents, using reasoning traces to inform architectural interaction design grounded in dramaturgical principles.

This paper addresses robotic system engineering for safety- and mission-critical applications by bridging the gap between high-level objectives and formal, executable specifications. The proposed method, Robotic System Task to Model Transformation Methodology (RSTM2) is an ontology-driven, hierarchical approach using stochastic timed Petri nets with resources, enabling Monte Carlo simulations at mission, system, and subsystem levels. A hypothetical case study demonstrates how the RSTM2 method supports architectural trades, resource allocation, and performance analysis under uncertainty. Ontological concepts further enable explainable AI-based assistants, facilitating fully autonomous specification synthesis. The methodology offers particular benefits to complex multi-robot systems, such as the NASA CADRE mission, representing decentralized, resource-aware, and adaptive autonomous systems of the future.