Research Papers

The Explanation Game -- Rekindled (Extended Version)

Joao Marques-Silva, Xuanxiang Huang, Olivier Letoffe

Recent work demonstrated the existence of critical flaws in the current use of Shapley values in explainable AI (XAI), i.e. the so-called SHAP scores. These flaws are significant in that the scores provided to a human decision-maker can be misleading. Although these negative results might appear to indicate that Shapley values ought not be used in XAI, this paper argues otherwise. Concretely, this paper proposes a novel definition of SHAP scores that overcomes existing flaws. Furthermore, the paper outlines a practically efficient solution for the rigorous estimation of the novel SHAP scores. Preliminary experimental results confirm our claims, and further underscore the flaws of the current SHAP scores.

The widespread use of artificial intelligence deep neural networks in fields such as medicine and engineering necessitates understanding their decision-making processes. Current explainability methods often produce inconsistent results and struggle to highlight essential signals influencing model inferences. This paper introduces the Evolutionary Independent Deterministic Explanation (EVIDENCE) theory, a novel approach offering a deterministic, model-independent method for extracting significant signals from black-box models. EVIDENCE theory, grounded in robust mathematical formalization, is validated through empirical tests on diverse datasets, including COVID-19 audio diagnostics, Parkinson's disease voice recordings, and the George Tzanetakis music classification dataset (GTZAN). Practical applications of EVIDENCE include improving diagnostic accuracy in healthcare and enhancing audio signal analysis. For instance, in the COVID-19 use case, EVIDENCE-filtered spectrograms fed into a frozen Residual Network with 50 layers improved precision by 32% for positive cases and increased the area under the curve (AUC) by 16% compared to baseline models. For Parkinson's disease classification, EVIDENCE achieved near-perfect precision and sensitivity, with a macro average F1-Score of 0.997. In the GTZAN, EVIDENCE maintained a high AUC of 0.996, demonstrating its efficacy in filtering relevant features for accurate genre classification. EVIDENCE outperformed other Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods such as LIME, SHAP, and GradCAM in almost all metrics. These findings indicate that EVIDENCE not only improves classification accuracy but also provides a transparent and reproducible explanation mechanism, crucial for advancing the trustworthiness and applicability of AI systems in real-world settings.

This research introduces an advanced Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) framework designed to elucidate the decision-making processes of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents in ORAN architectures. By offering network-oriented explanations, the proposed scheme addresses the critical challenge of understanding and optimizing the control actions of DRL agents for resource management and allocation. Traditional methods, both model-agnostic and model-specific approaches, fail to address the unique challenges presented by XAI in the dynamic and complex environment of RAN slicing. This paper transcends these limitations by incorporating intent-based action steering, allowing for precise embedding and configuration across various operational timescales. This is particularly evident in its integration with xAPP and rAPP sitting at near-real-time and non-real-time RIC, respectively, enhancing the system's adaptability and performance. Our findings demonstrate the framework's significant impact on improving Key Performance Indicator (KPI)-based rewards, facilitated by the ability to make informed multimodal decisions involving multiple control parameters by a DRL agent. Thus, our work marks a significant step forward in the practical application and effectiveness of XAI in optimizing ORAN resource management strategies.

The properties of biological materials like proteins and nucleic acids are largely determined by their primary sequence. While certain segments in the sequence strongly influence specific functions, identifying these segments, or so-called motifs, is challenging due to the complexity of sequential data. While deep learning (DL) models can accurately capture sequence-property relationships, the degree of nonlinearity in these models limits the assessment of monomer contributions to a property - a critical step in identifying key motifs. Recent advances in explainable AI (XAI) offer attention and gradient-based methods for estimating monomeric contributions. However, these methods are primarily applied to classification tasks, such as binding site identification, where they achieve limited accuracy (40-45%) and rely on qualitative evaluations. To address these limitations, we introduce a DL model with interpretable steps, enabling direct tracing of monomeric contributions. We also propose a metric ($\mathcal{I}$), inspired by the masking technique in the field of image analysis and natural language processing, for quantitative analysis on datasets mainly containing distinct properties of anti-cancer peptides (ACP), antimicrobial peptides (AMP), and collagen. Our model exhibits 22% higher explainability, pinpoints critical motifs (RRR, RRI, and RSS) that significantly destabilize ACPs, and identifies motifs in AMPs that are 50% more effective in converting non-AMPs to AMPs. These findings highlight the potential of our model in guiding mutation strategies for designing protein-based biomaterials.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays an important role in improving the transparency and reliability of complex machine learning models, especially in critical domains such as cybersecurity. Despite the prevalence of heuristic interpretation methods such as SHAP and LIME, these techniques often lack formal guarantees and may produce inconsistent local explanations. To fulfill this need, few tools have emerged that use formal methods to provide formal explanations. Among these, XReason uses a SAT solver to generate formal instance-level explanation for XGBoost models. In this paper, we extend the XReason tool to support LightGBM models as well as class-level explanations. Additionally, we implement a mechanism to generate and detect adversarial examples in XReason. We evaluate the efficiency and accuracy of our approach on the CICIDS-2017 dataset, a widely used benchmark for detecting network attacks.

To address this gap, we introduce Libra-Leaderboard, a comprehensive framework designed to rank LLMs through a balanced evaluation of performance and safety. Combining a dynamic leaderboard with an interactive LLM arena, Libra-Leaderboard encourages the joint optimization of capability and safety. Unlike traditional approaches that average performance and safety metrics, Libra-Leaderboard uses a distance-to-optimal-score method to calculate the overall rankings. This approach incentivizes models to achieve a balance rather than excelling in one dimension at the expense of some other ones. In the first release, Libra-Leaderboard evaluates 26 mainstream LLMs from 14 leading organizations, identifying critical safety challenges even in state-of-the-art models.

Ethics and Technical Aspects of Generative AI Models in Digital Content Creation

Atahan Karagoz

Generative AI models like GPT-4o and DALL-E 3 are reshaping digital content creation, offering industries tools to generate diverse and sophisticated text and images with remarkable creativity and efficiency. This paper examines both the capabilities and challenges of these models within creative workflows. While they deliver high performance in generating content with creativity, diversity, and technical precision, they also raise significant ethical concerns. Our study addresses two key research questions: (a) how these models perform in terms of creativity, diversity, accuracy, and computational efficiency, and (b) the ethical risks they present, particularly concerning bias, authenticity, and potential misuse. Through a structured series of experiments, we analyze their technical performance and assess the ethical implications of their outputs, revealing that although generative models enhance creative processes, they often reflect biases from their training data and carry ethical vulnerabilities that require careful oversight. This research proposes ethical guidelines to support responsible AI integration into industry practices, fostering a balance between innovation and ethical integrity.

Recent advancements in Vision Transformers (ViT) have demonstrated exceptional results in various visual recognition tasks, owing to their ability to capture long-range dependencies in images through self-attention mechanisms. However, the complex nature of ViT models requires robust explainability methods to unveil their decision-making processes. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays a crucial role in improving model transparency and trustworthiness by providing insights into model predictions. Current approaches to ViT explainability, based on visualization techniques such as Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) and gradient-based methods, have shown promising but sometimes limited results. In this study, we explore a hybrid approach that mixes multiple explainability techniques to overcome these limitations and enhance the interpretability of ViT models. Our experiments reveal that this hybrid approach significantly improves the interpretability of ViT models compared to individual methods. We also introduce modifications to existing techniques, such as using geometric mean for mixing, which demonstrates notable results in object segmentation tasks. To quantify the explainability gain, we introduced a novel post-hoc explainability measure by applying the Pigeonhole principle. These findings underscore the importance of refining and optimizing explainability methods for ViT models, paving the way to reliable XAI-based segmentations.

The use of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems has introduced a set of challenges that need resolution. The XAI robustness, or stability, has been one of the goals of the community from its beginning. Multiple authors have proposed evaluating this feature using objective evaluation measures. Nonetheless, many questions remain. With this work, we propose a novel approach to meta-evaluate these metrics, i.e. analyze the correctness of the evaluators. We propose two new tests that allowed us to evaluate two different stability measures: AVG-Sensitiviy and MAX-Senstivity. We tested their reliability in the presence of perfect and robust explanations, generated with a Decision Tree; as well as completely random explanations and prediction. The metrics results showed their incapacity of identify as erroneous the random explanations, highlighting their overall unreliability.

With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in smart homes and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), ethical concerns have become increasingly significant. This paper explores the ethical implications of AI-driven detection technologies in smart homes using the User Requirements Notation (URN) framework. In this paper, we thoroughly conduct thousands of related works from 1985 to 2024 to identify key trends in AI ethics, algorithm methods, and technological advancements. The study presents an overview of smart home and AI ethics, comparing traditional and AI-specific ethical issues, and provides guidelines for ethical design across areas like privacy, fairness, transparency, accountability, and user autonomy, offering insights for developers and researchers in smart homes.

In the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, machine perception is becoming paramount to achieving increased performance. Image classification systems are becoming increasingly integral to various applications, ranging from medical diagnostics to image generation; however, these systems often exhibit harmful biases that can lead to unfair and discriminatory outcomes. Machine Learning systems that depend on a single data modality, i.e. only images or only text, can exaggerate hidden biases present in the training data, if the data is not carefully balanced and filtered. Even so, these models can still harm underrepresented populations when used in improper contexts, such as when government agencies reinforce racial bias using predictive policing. This thesis explores the intersection of technology and ethics in the development of fair image classification models. Specifically, I focus on improving fairness and methods of using multiple modalities to combat harmful demographic bias. Integrating multimodal approaches, which combine visual data with additional modalities such as text and metadata, allows this work to enhance the fairness and accuracy of image classification systems. The study critically examines existing biases in image datasets and classification algorithms, proposes innovative methods for mitigating these biases, and evaluates the ethical implications of deploying such systems in real-world scenarios. Through comprehensive experimentation and analysis, the thesis demonstrates how multimodal techniques can contribute to more equitable and ethical AI solutions, ultimately advocating for responsible AI practices that prioritize fairness.

The REAIM 2024 Blueprint for Action states that AI applications in the military domain should be ethical and human-centric and that humans must remain responsible and accountable for their use and effects. Developing rigorous test and evaluation, verification and validation (TEVV) frameworks will contribute to robust oversight mechanisms. TEVV in the development and deployment of AI systems needs to involve human users throughout the lifecycle. Traditional human-centred test and evaluation methods from human factors need to be adapted for deployed AI systems that require ongoing monitoring and evaluation. The language around AI-enabled systems should be shifted to inclusion of the human(s) as a component of the system. Standards and requirements supporting this adjusted definition are needed, as are metrics and means to evaluate them. The need for dialogue between technologists and policymakers on human-centred TEVV will be evergreen, but dialogue needs to be initiated with an objective in mind for it to be productive. Development of TEVV throughout system lifecycle is critical to support this evolution including the issue of human scalability and impact on scale of achievable testing. Communication between technical and non technical communities must be improved to ensure operators and policy-makers understand risk assumed by system use and to better inform research and development. Test and evaluation in support of responsible AI deployment must include the effect of the human to reflect operationally realised system performance. Means of communicating the results of TEVV to those using and making decisions regarding the use of AI based systems will be key in informing risk based decisions regarding use.