Research Papers

Maritime systems operate in highly dynamic environments where unexpected equipment failures can compromise safety, reliability, and operational efficiency. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, digital twins, and predictive maintenance enable proactive failure prediction and prevention. However, ensuring trustworthy and explainable decision-making remains a major challenge in safety-critical maritime applications. This chapter reviews key AI technologies required for explainable failure prediction and prevention in maritime systems and presents a conceptual architecture capable of supporting autonomous or human-in-the-loop corrective actions. This architecture integrates data acquisition, time-series forecasting, anomaly detection, risk assessment, decision-making, and explainable AI into a closed-loop framework. With reference to the architectural components, a review and discussion of relevant maritime studies is performed, outlining their methods, advantages, and limitations. Furthermore, it highlights current challenges, including uncertainty and robustness, model generalization, explainability, limited availability of maritime datasets, and operational deployment, and identifies future research directions toward trustworthy AI-assisted maritime decision-making.

In this paper, we propose an explainable artificial intelligence framework to explain the solution of optimal control problems predicted with graph neural networks (GNNs). The proposed approach first trains a GNN that predicts the solution of the optimal control problem for a given instance represented as a graph. Given the trained GNN, we use explainable AI algorithms to identify variables, constraints, variable-constraint connections, and parameters, i.e., nodes, edges, and features in the graph representation of the optimal control problem, that affect the prediction of the optimal solution the most. We apply the proposed approach to a case study regarding the optimal control of a continuous stirred tank reactor. First, the results show that the GNN model can accurately predict the optimal values of the manipulated variables. Application of explainable AI algorithms reveals equality and inequality constraints that are the most important for predicting the optimal solution. The inequality constraints correspond to ramping constraints, some of which are active at the optimal solution.

In the field of Explainable AI (XAI), counterfactual (CF) explanations interpret a model's decision by suggesting the changes to the input that would lead to a more favourable outcome. To be useful in practice, such an explanation should change few features and change them as little as possible, properties known as sparsity and proximity. We observe that existing methods remain limited in this respect, especially for numerical features, whether they are model-agnostic and amortised, or gradient-based with full access to the model. In this paper, we propose FlowCF, a model-agnostic generative method that frames CF generation as sparse transport from the factual to the target class. We solve this transport with flow matching, which we extend to mixed feature types with a novel mixed flow operator, and exploit the resulting geometry to optimise for sparsity through a gating network that minimises the number of features the transport changes. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that FlowCF produces the best numerical sparsity and proximity, changing 29% of the numerical features where the best baseline changes 89%, at 70% smaller displacement, while remaining comparable on the other desiderata.

Workplace sensing studies combine long-running behaviour traces with self-reports, yet the tools that collect those data often sit apart from the interface that returns results. We present TrustmeWatcher, the application built for the TRUST-ME project to connect this work. TrustmeWatcher reuses ActivityWatch's OS-level watchers for computer-activity collection and adds its own application layer. It turns the collected traces into an interactive screen-time dashboard, synchronizes responses from short questionnaires completed on the StreamDeck, and presents questionnaires alongside video highlights. Activity records and self-reports are aligned into labelled records for model development. The scope of this paper is limited to ActivityWatch data as model input. Artificial intelligence (AI) uses these activity records to predict six normalized state scores and an overall well-being score. The trained model runs locally, and the dashboard presents its predictions in semantic bands. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) helps users understand how recorded activity contributed to a prediction. Privacy Control lets users pause or resume the camera and eye tracker used by the study. We describe the workflow, its user-device and sensing-setup boundaries, and its use with records from 17 participants. The result is a deployed application and study workflow that integrates activity review, study data collection, privacy control, local prediction, and a participant-facing interface for XAI evaluation.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) encompasses methods that draw on different sources of information and address different explanatory needs. A common framework is needed to describe how this information becomes evidence and is communicated as an explanation for a particular recipient. We propose the General Framework for Generating Explanations (GFGE), grounded in interpretative frameworks and the complementary activities of \emph{sense-reading} and \emph{sense-giving}. Its conceptual foundation is the Interpret/Explain Schema (IES), which connects an analyst's interpretation of system evidence, the communication of a selected account, and the recipient's interpretation of that account. GFGE operationalises this schema through five roles: data interpretation, model interpretation, output interpretation, optional post-hoc analysis, and aggregation. A role-typed operation graph records method-specific dependencies, while evidence records retain the sources, assumptions, and limitations of explanatory claims. The explanatory question, audience, and context guide the procedure. We instantiate GFGE for attribution, surrogate, counterfactual, concept and prototype, intrinsic rule, argumentation, and language-model methods. These instantiations show how intrinsic, post-hoc, and hybrid workflows can be represented through the same roles while preserving their distinct evidential requirements. GFGE provides a common basis for analysing explanation workflows, tracing communicated claims to their evidence, and identifying unresolved explanatory dependencies.

Deep remaining-useful-life (RUL) models on NASA C-MAPSS are now routine, and so are heatmaps that colour sensors and timesteps. A heatmap that looks mechanical is not the same as an explanation an engineer can act on. We train three standard architectures - a 1D CNN, an LSTM, and a small Transformer encoder - on the official FD001 and FD003 splits with the piecewise RUL cap of 125 cycles and the official PHM08 asymmetric score. We then attach three attribution maps (Integrated Gradients, occlusion, last-layer attention) and evaluate them with the checks the XAI-for-PdM literature still under-reports: deletion/insertion faithfulness, Spearman stability under sensor-scale noise, agreement across training seeds, and cosine consistency inside RUL bins. Prediction error is a prerequisite, not the claim. The headline is which explanation method moves the RUL output when its top cells are removed, and which map survives a 5% input perturbation. Integrated Gradients and occlusion are similarly faithful on the LSTM; Transformer attention is cheap and temporally smooth but weakly faithful. All three maps are almost unchanged under 5% input noise, yet IG/occlusion agree only moderately across two LSTM seeds - stability to sensor jitter is not the same as stability to retraining. A secondary tabular check on the AI4I 2020 failure dataset shows the same deletion pattern for tree importances. We recommend occlusion or IG for any C-MAPSS-style report that will be read by a maintenance engineer, and we treat raw attention weights as a visualisation only.

Distributed Energy Resource (DER) environments rely on network communication protocols to coordinate control commands, measurements, and device states across edge assets and cloud systems. Edge anomaly detection systems (ADS) monitor this traffic to identify deviations from normal communication behavior, flagging suspicious flows for further investigation. When the ADS flags abnormal network traffic, a single attack label is often insufficient for operational response: the label reports the detector's selected class but does not expose alternative threat interpretations that may warrant investigation. This paper presents Cybersecurity Threat Reasoning with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (CyTReX), an evidence-grounded threat reasoning framework for DER security that transforms network-level anomaly alerts into ranked, analyst-facing threat hypotheses designed to support Security Operations Center (SOC) triage and investigation. CyTReX constrains large language model (LLM) reasoning through a structured evidence packet, defined as a consolidated record of detection outputs, model explanations, and cyber threat intelligence (CTI) context. The evidence packet integrates edge-layer anomaly detection evidence, cloud reasoning layer attack interpretation, Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) network-feature attributions, surrogate decision rules, and Model Context Protocol (MCP)-enabled CTI enrichment. This ensures that every ranked hypothesis and attack-tree branch is traceable to explicit evidence rather than free-form LLM inference, and that incomplete or conflicting evidence is communicated rather than suppressed. Evaluation across five configurations shows that additional reasoning components improve hypothesis specificity, evidence traceability, and analytical grounding, with the complete pipeline providing the richest evidence-grounded reasoning context.

Neural network-based approaches have emerged as efficient alternatives to traditional optimization-based procedures for the calibration of stochastic volatility models. However, existing work has focused primarily on predictive accuracy, with comparatively little attention devoted to understanding the structure of the learned inverse calibration mappings. In this work, we analyze neural calibration mappings for the Heston and rough Heston models across multilayer perceptron, highway, and softmax-parametrized highway architectures, using complementary Shapley-based methods from explainable AI. Specifically, we consider SHAP and $ν$SHAP explanations, which capture distinct, complementary notions of feature relevance, corresponding to sensitivity and sufficiency of feature subsets, respectively. Short maturities and smile wings consistently dominate parameter inference, and the dominant attribution structure remains qualitatively stable across architectures despite differences in predictive accuracy and parameter count. Parameter-specific differences between SHAP and $ν$SHAP further reveal how distinct regions of the implied volatility surface contribute to parameter recovery and expose substantial redundancy in the calibration input. Building on this redundancy, we show that $ν$SHAP explanations can guide a significant reduction in input dimensionality for the rough Heston model while matching calibration accuracy relative to the full implied volatility surface. These findings demonstrate that complementary Shapley-based methods provide structural insight into learned inverse calibration mappings beyond predictive error metrics, and offer a practical route to feature selection in neural calibration problems.

Seeing through the Eyes of AI: Situated Explainability in Augmented Reality

Ana Stanescu, Lucchas Ribeiro Skreinig, Tobias Langlotz +5

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables humans to understand and interpret decisions of AI models. Instead of having a black box, explainability supports humans in understanding AI models' behavior. Existing explainable AI approaches often present explanations on 2D displays using pre-recorded data, requiring users to relate the displayed information back to the physical objects and real world locations involved in a model's decision. Users are forced to decouple data exploration and capture from AI model interpretation. For AI systems that work within physical environments, this separation can make explanations difficult to interpret in context. We propose using Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance the understanding of AI models by enabling spatial explainability information directly in a user's workspace, in real time, as they explore the world. We show how known explainability methods can be applied in AR and provide insights into user experiences with such an application.

An important and unresolved problem in the physical sciences is explaining the predictions made by neural networks. Several explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods have been proposed to address this problem, including gradient XAI, Integrated Gradients, and GradientSHAP. We evaluate the baseline XAI methods according to four scores: sensitivity (XAI patterns strongly affect predictions), attribution (XAI patterns reproduce the change in prediction relative to a baseline), robustness (XAI patterns remain stable for nearby inputs), and coherence (XAI patterns are spatially smooth). We also introduce a new method, average gradient outer product (AGOP) XAI, that uses global gradient information to identify an important direction for a specific input. We apply XAI to neural network predictions of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) based on data from the Zebiak-Cane model. AGOP XAI achieves the highest attribution, robustness, and coherence scores in the architecture and lead-time comparisons reported here. Its sensitivity is surpassed by gradient XAI, which is maximally sensitive by definition. Beyond diagnosing neural-network behavior, AGOP XAI can generate candidate hypotheses about physical mechanisms. The method highlights an equatorial thermocline-depth signal consistent with recharge oscillator physics, together with a southeastern-Pacific lobe that may be specific to the Zebiak-Cane model. Finally, we test the physical relevance of AGOP using optimized perturbations that move the Zebiak-Cane model along AGOP explanation coordinates. Such perturbations can suppress the selected extreme events or, from a near-neutral ensemble, generate strong El Niño or La Niña events 10 months later.

XAI Evaluation Cards: A Practical Method for Designing Human-Centred XAI Evaluations

Kristýna Sirka Kacafírková, Ivania Donoso-Guzmán, Denis Parra +2

Evaluating explainable AI (XAI) systems from a human-centred approach requires researchers to select from numerous evaluation dimensions and measures, often in an ad hoc and fragmented manner. This paper introduces a method to help HCI, computer science, designers and social science researchers systematically evaluate XAI systems. The approach is based on an updated XAI-specific evaluation framework derived from an analysis of 82 studies. Using this framework, we developed a card-sorting method with 36 cards to help researchers prioritise relevant evaluation aspects. The process was tested with two research groups (n = 13) across five projects. The XAI Evaluation Cards are available as a printable appendix, along with an online repository of methods from previous XAI studies. Although not exhaustive, our findings indicate that the card-sorting approach can organise and streamline the design of the evaluation process, encouraging a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary assessment of XAI systems in research and development.

Explainability is increasingly required for perception models in intelligent vehicles, yet whether explanations remain faithful under driving domain shift is still poorly understood. This work audits post-hoc explanations of a fixed YOLOv8s pedestrian detector across PIE and JAAD using ROI-based D-Deletion, frozen confidence terciles, rank-based tests, bootstrap intervals, and Holm correction. The audit shows that deletion-based faithfulness is strongly coupled to detection strength at explanation time, with Spearman correlations between 0.70 and 0.82 for D-RISE, making naive confidence-stratified comparisons unreliable. After controlling for detection strength within fixed f0 bins, D-RISE faithfulness remains domain-dependent in the central f0 range, with PIE showing higher D-Deletion than JAAD and Holm-adjusted significance. A non-perturbative EigenCAM baseline is less faithful than D-RISE but also exhibits score coupling, suggesting that the effect is not specific to D-RISE and is related to the deletion-based evaluation setup. These results motivate confidence-controlled XAI audits for safety-critical perception under domain shift.