Research Papers

Assessing Alignment and Stability of Feature Importance Explanations via Weight of Evidence

Eddie Conti, Claudio Daka, Álvaro Parafita +3

Feature importance Methods (FIMs) are widely used in Explainable AI to interpret model predictions, yet attribution scores alone often provide limited insight into the underlying reasoning process. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective by embedding FIMs within a hypothesis-testing framework based on Weight of Evidence (WoE). We quantify how strongly the observed evidence supports any given hypothesis on feature importance. The reference hypothesis can stem from domain knowledge, ground truth, or be derived from the FIM itself. This formulation enables a principled evaluation of FIMs, capturing both their alignment with prior knowledge and their variability. We further provide theoretical results linking WoE to attribution variance. Empirical results shows the applicability and flexibility of our strategy analyzing LIME and SHAP explanations in settings with different reference hypotheses. Overall, our framework offers a complementary tool for assessing FIMs through a contrastive, evidence-based lens.

Corrosion accounts for approximately 4% of global GDP, and reliable prediction is essential for timely mitigation. Machine learning effectively predicts corrosion rates from composition, microstructure, and environmental variables, but cannot explain the underlying mechanisms. A reliable approach in safety-critical materials engineering requires not only accurate retrieval but also mechanistically defensible reasoning, a capability that existing factuality metrics cannot assess. This work presents a domain-adapted retrieval-augmented generation framework for corrosion knowledge synthesis, demonstrated on magnesium alloy corrosion. Three open-weight language models (Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B, Mistral-7B) are fine-tuned on 3,309 expert-verified question-answer pairs from 840 peer-reviewed papers and integrated with a hybrid dense-lexical retrieval pipeline. Retrieval augmentation produces Token F1 gains of 143-194%, with system faithfulness of 0.964 and context recall of 0.988. Blind external validation on newly published literature and in-house electrochemical data confirms trend-level generalisation. Reason Map, a proposition-graph framework, is further introduced; it independently constructs directed evidence graphs from generated answers and retrieved literature, enabling systematic detection of causal direction inversions and unsupported inferential leaps that flat factuality metrics cannot expose. The modular architecture can be applied across domains, offering a generalizable blueprint for trustworthy AI-assisted knowledge synthesis to circumvent corrosion, which can also be applied to other engineering domains.

The increasing digitalization of industrial infrastructure and the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) have expanded the cyberattack surface of industrial systems. To address the growing complexity of cyber threats, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly deployed within industrial cybersecurity operations, particularly in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). While these approaches improve anomaly detection, threat analysis, and automated response, their opaque decision-making presents challenges for operational trust, regulatory compliance, and incident response. EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve the transparency and interpretability of AI-driven cybersecurity systems and decisions. This paper provides a comprehensive review of XAI techniques in industrial cybersecurity, focusing on industrial SOC environments and operational security workflows. We examine the role of AI in industrial SOC workflows, the types of operational data leveraged in industrial environments, and the benefits and limitations of AI-based threat detection. We then review major families of XAI approaches, including feature attribution methods, surrogate models, rule-based explanations, and visualization techniques, and analyze their applicability to industrial use cases. We further discuss the operational, regulatory, and safety requirements that distinguish industrial systems from traditional IT environments. Key challenges are examined, including limited labeled datasets, model reliability, explainability-performance tradeoffs, and the integration of XAI tools into SOC workflows. Finally, we identify open research directions and opportunities for developing trustworthy, operationally viable, and domain-specific XAI-enabled cybersecurity solutions for industrial environments.

The separation of cardiovascular sounds is a critical task in biomedical signal processing. In this paper, we introduce XVAE-WMT1, an unsupervised explainable generative AI algorithm combining a variational autoencoder (VAE) with explainable AI (XAI), wavelet-based inputs, a post-hoc output mask, and temporal consistency (TC) loss. Unlike existing supervised and VAE-based methods that rely on Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and ignore latent interpretability, XVAE-WMT requires no paired clean recordings and integrates a Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) front-end for superior time-frequency localization. We assessed the latent space interpretability via different metrics, with SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) enabling dimensionality reduction to the top 75% of latent features while preserving separation quality. Evaluated across two datasets using Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR), Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR), and Signal-to-Artifacts Ratio (SAR), XVAE-WMT attains 26.8 dB SDR, 32.8 dB SIR, and 28.6 dB SAR.

Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) AI has recently emerged as a novel paradigm to enable trustworthy AI, aiming at integrating sub-symbolic neural perception with grounded symbolic reasoning. The neuro-symbolic integration process that characterizes these models has been proven beneficial to achieve more transparent, explainable and efficient AI systems. Meanwhile, their properties under adversarial settings have been overlooked being frequently deemed robust-by-design. However, the neural-symbolic integration process they leverage constitutes an additional layer of complexity that may provide an attack entry-point. Therefore, in this paper, we claim that an in-depth investigation of the adversarial robustness of NeSy models is necessary and provide the first systematic evaluation of backdoor attacks against NeSy. To this end, we compare the most popular NeSy framework, namely DeepProbLog, against baseline neural networks across a total of eight backdoor settings and four reasoning tasks. Our experimental results show that while NeSy models are indeed more robust than their neural counterpart on average, their robustness vastly depend on the strictness of the reasoning process being enforced and its compatibility with the chosen adversarial target. The source code to reproduce our experiments is made available at https://github.com/marcoantoniocorallo/NeSy-Backdoor.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly harmful datasets can lead to misalignment broadly, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment (EM). EM poses a challenge for AI safety and our understanding of LLMs. Prior work often frames EM as an unexpected behavior, and explains it by appealing to general misalignment directions or anthropomorphizing it as acquiring an evil persona. However, the mechanisms behind these framings remain obscure. In this work, we show that EM is a predictable and data-dependent generalization phenomenon. By examining the base model's representation of EM training data and evaluation prompts, we find that evilness after EM training is highly predictable from representational distance: the closer an evaluation prompt is to training data centroid, the more evilness it elicits from EM models after training (with an average Spearman correlation of -0.73 across 12 model-dataset settings). Building upon this analysis, we further demystify EM by showing that (1) its effectiveness changes significantly based on training data format; (2) there is not a general misalignment direction that transfers across different EM models; (3) the effect of EM is fundamentally different from persona changes. Furthermore, we extend the EM generalization metric from a scalar distance to a dataset-specific generalization direction, which robustly predicts EM models' evilness under semantics-preserving prompt perturbations including appending random tokens and paraphrasing, where other methods do not reliably generalize.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) increasingly calls for actionable counterfactual recourse, yet current methodologies face challenges related to causal invalidity, excessive cognitive burden, and predictive failure. Exhaustive causal search algorithms often require modifications to multiple attributes, whereas additive attribution-guided methods, such as SHAP, ignore higher-order feature synergies, leading to suboptimal predictive momentum and diffuse intervention effort in complex nonlinear models, such as XGBoost. To bridge this gap, we introduce actionable case-based feature importance (A-CBFI), a diagnosis-prescription integrated framework for tabular machine learning. Grounded in structural causal models (SCMs), A-CBFI isolates synergistic interaction bottlenecks and releases suppressive structural locks, translating them into targeted interventions. By mathematically separating the active user intervention space (L_{\mathrm{active}}) from downstream effects and concentrating over 98.3% of the intervention effort on diagnosed root causes, A-CBFI enables highly targeted interventions. Empirical evaluations across the financial and healthcare domains demonstrate that A-CBFI reduces the active human intervention burden by 77.0% while maintaining comparable global recourse cost to exhaustive causal baselines. By prioritizing the diagnosed causal bottlenecks, A-CBFI provides targeted and actionable recourse while maintaining causal validity and achieving full relative convergence across all causally feasible instances.

Artificial intelligence has strong potential to support clinical decision-making, yet its adoption in healthcare remains limited due to a lack of trust. Uncertainty estimation can signal unreliable predictions, and explainable AI (XAI) can clarify how predictions are made but existing methods treat them separately, providing no feature-level insight into why a prediction is uncertain or which tests to prioritize to reduce it. To address this gap, we propose explainable uncertainty estimation, which unifies uncertainty estimation and XAI to both quantify uncertainty and explain feature-level contributions. We introduce the Expected Gradients Reconstruction Uncertainty Estimate (egRUE), which incorporates prediction explanations into its uncertainty computation and decomposes uncertainty into feature-wise contributions. We prove theoretical properties of egRUE and show through experiments that it improves reliability and interpretability compared to existing methods. A user study with medical experts further demonstrates that egRUE's explanations improve calibrated trust over uncertainty scores alone, increasing confidence in correct predictions and reducing confidence in incorrect ones. By combining prediction uncertainty with feature-level explanations, egRUE strengthens decision-making support in safety-critical healthcare settings, clarifying both when predictions may be unreliable and which features drive that uncertainty.

Computational pathology (CompPath) is transforming medicine by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to support diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment prediction from gigapixel whole-slide images. Clinical adoption is progressing, but is constrained by concerns about safety, accountability, and regulatory oversight in high-stakes clinical environments. Explainable AI (XAI) systems hold promise for building trust and enabling verification, yet the literature remains fragmented due to inconsistent terminology, overlapping methodological families, ad hoc validation, and current reviews. This review aims to formalize XAI methods in CompPath through the: i) introduction of a pathology-centric vocabulary comprising seven core terms; ii) development of a taxonomy across methodological families and three orthogonal axes (stage, type, scope); and iii) establishment of a task-driven framework that maps five clinical questions to recommended methods, method evaluation, and deployment context. Five key gaps between current XAI capabilities and clinical deployment are identified, and actionable steps are proposed to advance XAI for CompPath.

Ensuring a safe virtual reality (VR) experience requires systems that can predict and respond when users lose their balance. Although prior work has examined fall prediction and motion sickness, many approaches are regression-based and postural state classification remains less explored. This study compares machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models for classifying postural states in VR under visual perturbations. We used a multimodal dataset containing kinematic, electromyographic (EMG), and electrodermal activity (EDA) signals. The data were prepared for a binary task to distinguish balanced from imbalanced postural states, and participant-wise downsampling addressed class imbalance. All models were evaluated with Leave-One-Participant-Out (LOPO) cross-validation to test generalization to unseen participants. Among the models, the Mamba-inspired CNN (MI-CNN) achieved the highest accuracy of 96.76%. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis improved interpretability and identified the most influential classification factors. The SHAP results showed that kinematic features were dominant, indicating that body-motion patterns are informative for detecting imbalance in VR. We also evaluated MI-CNN using only the top two-thirds of features ranked by SHAP importance. Despite a 33% reduction in input dimensionality, the model maintained performance, achieving 0.957 accuracy and 0.957 F1-score, with about a 1% decrease compared with the full-feature model. These findings suggest that multimodal sensing, temporal deep learning, and explainable AI can support reliable classification of balance-related instability in VR. Accurate recognition of imbalanced postural states may raise awareness of fall risk and guide safer, adaptive VR systems that respond to instability while improving user safety and experience. Code is available at: https://github.com/NipaAnjum/MI-CNN.

Generative text-to-image (T2I) systems are increasingly adopted in creative practice, yet their normative behaviors remain underexplored from the perspective of creative practitioners. In this workshop paper, we present a within-subject study with 14 creative practitioners using Stable Diffusion to create illustration from two tasks of differing specificity. We investigate whether and how practitioners perceive normative behavior in a T2I system and how it impacts their creative process depending on task specificity. Our findings show that participants perceived normative behavior through invariant patterns, stereotypical output, and unsolicited omission or addition of details. These experiences led to feelings of disempowerment and creative compromise. We discuss implications for XAIxArts, including prompt transparency and artist empowerment in creative contexts.

In the realm of Explainable AI, classification results are often explained via counterfactuals (CFs for short), which are (ideally small) perturbations to an instance that lead to a change of classification label. Such CFs may serve as explanations for the prediction, pinpointing the features that were important. Existing explainability solutions typically aim at minimizing the distance of CFs from the original instance so that they are specific to it, and/or maximizing the diversity of CFs to cover multiple facets of the reasons underlying the prediction. In this paper, we note that in pursuing these aims, state-of-the-art explainability solutions may (and often do) yield counterfactual explanations that do not correspond to realistic instances. This limits their applicability and usefulness in practice. To remedy this, we combine ideas from Explainable AI with ideas from data management. Specifically, we capture realism of CFs via logical constraints that hold with respect to a dataset of examples (e.g., training set); the class of such constraints that we focus on is that of denial constraints, extensively studied in the context of relational databases. Algorithmically, we then combine explainable AI solutions to yield CFs, with ideas from data cleaning that we adapt to this unique setting, to transform CFs into realistic ones. Extensive experiments across four datasets validate that our solutions achieve realism with relatively minor compromise in terms of distance and diversity. They further validate that the dedicated optimizations that we have developed to speed up the search for CFs are indeed highly effective.