Research Papers

Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly integrated into optical network automation frameworks to support tasks such as failure management, performance monitoring and resource allocation. In these environments, ML-driven predictions may be directly coupled with control-plane actions where incorrect decisions can immediately impact service quality, resource efficiency, and network stability. As automation levels increase, ensuring the reliability of individual decisions at deployment time becomes a critical requirement. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques have emerged to improve transparency by highlighting the factors influencing ML predictions. In addition to identifying influential features, they provide insights into the underlying reasoning process of the model, revealing how different input variables contribute to the final outcome and how feature interactions shape the decision boundary. In this work, we introduce explanation-based runtime verification, an approach that exploits model explanations to assess the soundness of individual ML decisions before they are executed in the network control loop. The proposed approach evaluates explanation coherence and physics grounding consistency at runtime, enabling the system to defer or reject decisions flagged as uncertain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a representative use case of lightpath quality of transmission classification. Experimental results show that explanation-based verification can intercept a significant fraction of erroneous decisions while preserving high automation rate.

Validating Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods in medical imaging requires ground-truth data with known locations of informative features. However, current approaches rely on expert annotations, which are prone to labeling errors, or on hand-crafted artificial perturbations superimposed onto healthy images to mimic lesions or malignant features, which lack clinical realism. We present Local Label-Informed Feature Transfer (LLIFT), a framework for generating semi-synthetic brain magnetic resonance images with realistic lesions placed in user-controlled regions, which does not require pixel-level lesion annotations during training. We implement LLIFT with two generative paradigms: LLIFT-GAN, a custom GAN that learns pathological features from binary class labels alone, and LLIFT-DM, a diffusion-based inpainting pipeline conditioned on bounding-box masks via ControlNet. Both approaches are evaluated on brain magnetic resonance imaging data derived from the Human Connectome Project. In evaluations, both achieve Fréchet Inception Distance scores, with respect to the real pathological distribution, that are comparable to the inter-class reference between healthy and pathological images in the given dataset. Furthermore, qualitative inspection confirms the realism of lesion structures. The resulting benchmark datasets provide spatially controlled ground truth data for evaluating XAI methods in medical imaging.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for network automation, yet their output quality and inference cost can vary substantially across LLM families. We present HuGLEN, a stepwise evaluation pipeline that uses an LLM-as-a-judge together with a small set of expert ratings to enable scalable and reproducible comparison of candidate LLMs, and to rank them using a quality efficiency score (QES). We demonstrate HuGLEN for translating outputs from an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) model for the optical network quality of transmission (QoT) estimation task into operator-friendly explanations. Our results show that a medium-sized LLM (12B parameters) achieves the highest QES, indicating the best trade-off between explanation quality and efficiency. Overall, HuGLEN reduces the human-labeling burden while supporting consistent model selection for operator-facing automation tasks.

This study contributes toward development of an Automated Data Processing (ADP) framework designed to evaluate and reinforce optimal machine learning model-feature combinations for predictive tasks in fused deposition modeling (FDM) process datasets. The methodology is centered around a reinforcement learning-inspired policy updating mechanism, where multiple machine learning models are trained on both full feature sets and feature subsets selected through Shapley-based Explainable AI (SHAP XAI) across 217 datasets. At each episode, the framework assesses the predictive accuracy and F1-scores of each model-feature pair, computes a scalar reward, and updates $Q$ values to guide future model selection. SHAP XAI feature importance was employed to generate reduced yet informative feature subsets to enable the framework to explore performance with dimensionality. The policy was shown to evolve over multiple episodes, with reward distributions used to visualize performance stability. Overall, results indicate that leveraging the ADP framework through XAI algorithms successfully converges toward optimal model-feature configurations with improved accuracy and stability. Specifically, the proposed framework improves the test-set AUC from 0.9248 to 0.9731 and increases the mean reward value by more than fifty percent compared with the baseline full-feature configuration.

Can LLM Code Explanations Adapt to Diverse Problem-Solvers' Needs?

Andrew Anderson, David Piorkowski, Justin Weisz +2

Large language model (LLM) code explanations can support people in solving code-related problems, yet prior work has shown that people have diverse problem-solving styles. If explanations fail to meet people's problem-solving needs, they may be less productive in their occupations and miss opportunities to learn and grow. Although some research has examined how LLMs can adapt their outputs to a user's age or expertise, no prior work has examined how LLMs can adapt their code explanations to people's problem-solving styles. To address this gap, we developed prompts from an established inclusive design method that considers 5 types of problem-solving styles, and we generated 1,072 code explanations from six open-weight LLMs. Using natural language processing techniques, we uncovered a taxonomy of 13 linguistic adaptations, with each adaptation supported by evidence from the literature, the prompts, or the LLMs' outputs. They also show which LLMs adapted their code explanations more frequently than others. This paper is the first to investigate problem-solving style adaptations in LLM code explanation, contributing two problem-solving adaptation approaches: declarative statements for each adaptation and 10 problem-solving style prompts.

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) continue to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, their subpar performance on seemingly elementary problems, such as basic arithmetic, raises concerns about model reliability, safety, and ethical deployment. In this study, we demonstrate that the performance of a vanilla Transformer model trained on integer arithmetic tasks can be improved using methods effective for human learners. We begin by decomposing the arithmetic task into well-defined subtasks and conducting loss convergence order analysis together with ablation studies for each subtask. Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit learning patterns similar to those of human learners, with a faster learning speed for simpler subtasks compared to more complex ones. In addition, we successfully improved the accuracy of LLMs by applying problem-solving strategies and cognitive empowerment methods shown to enhance the performance of human learners. This suggests that transformer-based LLMs may share cognitive processes with human learners in arithmetic. Lastly, we provide a comprehensive demonstration of our method's effectiveness, including significant accuracy improvement experiments, visualization verification, and explanation-based analysis to illuminate the intricacies of LLMs in arithmetic learning. In general, this work explores the potential similarities between transformer-based LLMs and human learners, supported by explainable AI (XAI) verifications, ultimately fostering trust in LLMs for critical and high-stakes applications.

FST.ai 2.5: Explainable and Uncertainty-Aware AI for Olympic and Para-Taekwondo Decision Support, Athlete Digital Twins, and Federation-Scale Analytics

Keivan Shariatmadar, Ahmad Osman, Ramin Rey

The rapid digitalisation of elite sport has created new opportunities for integrating artificial intelligence (AI), performance analytics, and decision-support systems into athlete development and competition management. However, existing solutions remain fragmented, typically addressing isolated tasks such as performance analysis, athlete monitoring, or referee support. This paper presents \textbf{FST$\cdot$ai~2.5}, an explainable, uncertainty-aware, and secure AI framework for Olympic and Para-Taekwondo. \textbf{FST$\cdot$ai~2.5} introduces a unified digital ecosystem integrating athlete intelligence, competition analytics, federation-scale data management, AI-assisted decision support, athlete and event digital twins, explainable performance indicators, and adaptive training recommendations. The framework supports World Taekwondo (WT), Member National Associations (MNAs), coaches, referees, analysts, and athletes through transparent, secure, and federation-aware governance. By combining multi-source competition data, athlete-performance information, and contextual evidence, \textbf{FST$\cdot$ai~2.5} provides tactical diagnostics, longitudinal athlete monitoring, performance forecasting, personalised development planning, and federation-wide benchmarking using explainable and uncertainty-aware AI. Prototype deployments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework. Although developed for Olympic and Para-Taekwondo, the methodology is broadly applicable to explainable AI, digital twins, and trustworthy decision support in combat sports and other high-performance sporting environments.

A Method for Learning Value Systems in Generative AI

Andrés Holgado-Sánchez, Holger Billhardt, Sascha Ossowski

Value-aware AI systems require explicit computational representations of human values (groundings) and their aggregation into value systems in order to align their decisions with ours. As such representations are difficult to elicit, value learning seeks to infer them by observing human behaviour. This work addresses the lack of grounded value learning methods in generative AI: existing approaches typically replicate human preferences without awareness of the multidimensional structure of value alignment, or lack principled value system elicitation methods. To address these gaps, we adapt a previously validated value system learning method to the generative AI setting, which, based on pairwise prompt-response preference data, simultaneously learns: i) an implementation of a grounding for a set of values given by a multi-objective reward model, and ii) a value system representation in the form of a weighted linear scalarization of the previous grounding model. To ensure that the learned value systems are based on coherent value representations, our algorithm dynamically prioritizes the grounding learning process. We evaluate the method against baselines and a contemporary method on prompt-response preference datasets. Results show competitive performance and minimal trade-offs against the baselines, while improving explainability.

Solar flares are intense energy release events in the solar atmosphere that may pose significant space weather hazards, which makes developing reliable prediction models essential. Although deep learning methods, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), demonstrate strong predictive performance when using solar magnetograms, their scientific credibility is undermined by a lack of physical interpretability. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) offers a potential solution. However, current XAI studies in solar flare prediction are largely qualitative and lack systematic, theory-based, quantitative validation. We present a quantitative XAI framework that can decipher the physical basis of CNN-based solar flare prediction models. Using gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM), we identify model-focused regions (MFRs) in solar magnetograms. Then, we perform two key analyses to evaluate the predictive capability of magnetic parameters derived from MFRs and to quantitatively characterize their magnetic complexity. Our results reveal a strong physical correlation between MFRs and flare occurrence. Specifically, magnetic features extracted from MFRs demonstrate high predictive power for flares. Flare-producing active regions are characterized by magnetically complex configurations that are dominated by a single polarity rather than by balanced or purely unipolar structures. This finding is consistent with established physical theories of magnetic systems prone to flares. Our results suggest that CNNs can learn physically meaningful representations when trained on large-scale observations. Integrating XAI with quantitative magnetic field analysis improves the physical interpretability of deep learning-based flare prediction models, making them useful tools for prediction and modeling investigation in solar physics.

From Plausible to Actionable: A Position on LLM Self-Explanations

Elize Herrewijnen, Benedetta Muscato, Gizem Gezici +1

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate natural language explanations that rationalize their own decisions, a phenomenon commonly referred to as self-explanations. Such explanations have emerged as a promising direction for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), particularly for interpreting LLM behavior. However, while self-explanations often appear plausible, whether they faithfully reflect a model's underlying reasoning process remains an open question. In this opinion paper, we argue that self-explanations can be highly plausible, questionably faithful, and yet highly actionable. From a traditional XAI perspective, we identify the limitations of standard evaluation protocols for LLM-generated self-explanations and propose practical guidelines for assessing their plausibility and faithfulness. Moreover, we argue that evaluation should extend beyond these criteria to actionability, highlighting applications of LLM rationalization capabilities that support informed decision-making and appropriate action across diverse stakeholders.

Transparent educational question answering asks for answers that are not only correct but explainable, and doing so with small models rules out the reasoning power of the largest proprietary systems. The EXACT 2026 competition poses this problem concretely: open-weight language models of at most 8B parameters, self-hosted, with a natural-language explanation for every answer. It pairs two tasks: logical reasoning over university regulations, and multi-step physics problem solving. We describe the system that team \cotu{} developed to address both, a neuro-symbolic Program-of-Thought pipeline in which a 4B backbone writes a program rather than stating an answer directly: for regulation queries it emits a Z3 encoding whose entailment verdict grounds the deduction, and for physics it emits numerical Python, both wrapped in a shared self-correction loop and a unified explained-JSON output. Answer-type routing, distillation-based task fine-tuning, and a latency-aware serving stack -- SGLang with speculative decoding -- keep the system within the 60-second per-query limit. The system achieved a \textbf{perfect score} on the physics task in both automated selection rounds and obtained the \textbf{highest final-round technical score} of any team -- $13.44/15$, combining automated answer evaluation with expert-judged reasoning depth -- with the equally weighted presentation score included, \cotu{} placed 3rd overall. Grounding answers in a symbolic solver yields correct, verifiable deductions at the 4B scale, and the residual difficulty lies in premise selection rather than the deduction itself.

Perturbation-based xAI methods are widely used to analyze the behavior and predictions of deep learning models. By altering input regions and measuring the resulting changes in class probabilities with respect to the original image, they assign relevance scores and generate heatmaps that reflect each region's contribution to the prediction. Despite their apparent simplicity, however, perturbation-based methods are sensitive to parameter choices. In this work, we focus on two key parameters of the perturbation pipeline, namely the patch geometry, including the size and shape of the perturbed regions, and the perturbation type, defined by the replacement scheme. Grounded in the use case of flood detection from Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of how relevance estimation changes under different perturbation settings. Beyond visual inspection of the resulting relevance maps, we evaluate their consistency across perturbation strategies and their faithfulness to the model's reasoning. We demonstrate how different perturbation choices can steer the resulting relevance maps, yielding ambiguous and even contradictory explanations. Our findings emphasize the importance of methodological settings in perturbation-based xAI. They underscore the need to carefully inspect and evaluate perturbation choices and to treat them as an integral part when interpreting explanations, ensuring a robust understanding of both the explanations and model predictions.