Research Papers

Explaining machine-learning models is increasingly important for decision-making and consumer trust, yet it is widely believed to come at a cost: existing Explainable AI (XAI) methods suffer from a persistent accuracy-explainability trade-off. We argue that this trade-off is not fundamental, but an artifact of treating explanation and prediction as separate objectives; when properly coupled, they become complementary, so that equipping a model to explain itself improves, rather than degrades, its accuracy. We introduce the Rashomon Explanation paradigm, which builds a set of faithful, prediction-guiding explanations rather than a single one, and prove that this set is generally non-empty and that explanation fidelity bounds the performance of the models it guides. To explore this set, we propose RashomonLLM, an Explanation-Prediction-Reflection agentic workflow that generates explanations in natural language by iteratively aligning them with predictions, and we prove it converges and recovers the full set. Across customer-churn classification, clinical survival regression, and industrial click-through prediction on large-scale live-streaming logs, RashomonLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prediction and XAI baselines on both accuracy and explanation quality, with gains driven by explanation fidelity and robust to distribution shifts, temporal splits, and seeds. Our framework thus advances business performance while laying the groundwork for consumer trust.

Pre-demolition assessment, the regulated audit process at the heart of urban mining, is an information process in which AI support must serve qualified auditors who remain accountable for the decisions taken. The relevant unit of value is not prediction accuracy alone, but the defensibility of the supported decisions: their legibility, plausibility, sourcing, and contestability. Explainable AI techniques and domain knowledge graphs each address parts of this requirement, and existing taxonomies have catalogued their integration. The literature is descriptively rich but structurally under-specified: what remains less developed is a structural account of why specific integrations produce artefacts neither resource can provide alone. This paper offers a complementarity-theoretic interpretation grounded in the IS resource-based tradition. We propose four consolidated KG-XAI integration modes (Lifting, Constraining, Typing, and Revising), each defined as a typed operation over XAI artefacts and knowledge-graph substrate structures. Each mode unlocks a distinct property of defensibility and contributes to the kind of regulatory artefact pre-demolition assessment demands. A fire-door example from the urban-mining process illustrates the modes using the W3C Linked Building Data stack and valuation extensions.

Concept-based explainable artificial intelligence (AI) can make model reasoning more human-understandable, but concept-level outputs are not automatically trustworthy. We introduce ConceptSMILE, a model-agnostic perturbation-based auditing framework for evaluating the reliability of concept-based explanations. Rather than replacing SMILE, ConceptSMILE extends its perturbation-based logic from feature- or region-level attribution to the auditing of human-understandable concept explanations. The framework perturbs input regions, measures concept-response shifts, applies locality weighting, and fits an XGBoost surrogate to approximate local concept behaviour. Reliability is assessed through attribution accuracy, surrogate fidelity, faithfulness, stability, and consistency. We evaluate ConceptSMILE on retinal fundus images by comparing MedSAM-derived visual concepts with VLM-based semantic concepts. Results show that reliability varies across concepts and pathways: MedSAM achieves stronger spatial attribution and the highest surrogate fidelity ($R^2 = 0.8503$, $R_w^2 = 0.8465$), while the VLM pathway shows stronger vessel faithfulness and stronger stability under selected artefact conditions. ConceptSMILE provides an independent audit layer for evaluating the trustworthiness of concept-based XAI.

Crime linkage analysis is used in many countries to identify series of offences that may have been committed by the same individual. In practice, specialist analysts manually search for behavioural and situational connections across large crime databases, an effort that is time-consuming, cognitively demanding, and can involve repeated exposure to disturbing material. To support this work, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled decision-support tool was co-developed with a UK law enforcement agency to assist analysts in identifying likely crime linkages. This paper reports an industrial evaluation of the crime-linkage tool. We conducted a mixed-methods usability study combining direct observation, eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, and surveys to examine how analysts engage with AI predictions and with the model features presented as explanations. Our findings show that analysts used the AI predictions selectively and frequently validated them against behavioural (non-AI) evidence, reflecting partial trust and an ongoing reliance on established analytical practices. We also found that analysts attended to the presented model features and valued their availability, while identifying opportunities to improve how explanations are presented and integrated into the workflow. Overall, our results highlight the need for AI-enabled decision-support tools to better integrate explanations and traditional analytical methods, and demonstrate the importance of in-situ evaluation for engineering usable and trustworthy AI in high-stakes settings.

Diagnostic decision making often relies on a sequence of pathology tests that bridge patient symptoms and final disease diagnosis. Existing clinical decision-support systems typically focus on predicting single diseases and do not explicitly recommend sets of intermediate tests or model dependencies among them. In this paper, we formulate pathology test recommendation as a multi-label classification problem where each case is associated with multiple, interdependent tests. We propose an AI-based framework that applies classifier chains with logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, and their ensemble to capture label dependencies between tests. Experiments on an expert-curated dataset from a private pathology laboratory show that classifier-chain models outperform their independent counterparts, improving F1-score and reducing Hamming loss while maintaining high accuracy across common and rare tests. To enhance trust and transparency, we integrate SHAP-based explainable AI, providing symptom-level attributions that align with established clinical reasoning in most cases. The results demonstrate that classifier chains combined with SHAP offer an effective and interpretable approach for multi-label pathology test recommendation, with potential to support clinicians in selecting appropriate diagnostic tests at an early stage.

Multimodal emotion and sentiment recognition is commonly addressed by early fusion, which concatenates modalities before classification, or late fusion, which combines independently trained unimodal predictors. Early fusion can be accurate but monolithic, while late fusion is modular but may lose cross-modal interactions. This paper revisits XAI-guided adaptive fusion (\xgaf), a tree-based mixture of unimodal and cross-modal experts whose sample-level weights are derived from TreeSHAP attribution magnitudes. We focus on the effect of SHAP attribution reduction when experts have unequal feature dimensionalities. In this setting, mean-abs and median-abs reductions can suppress high-dimensional cross-modal experts, whereas sum-abs reduction preserves total attribution mass. On MELD 7-class emotion recognition, sum-abs \xgaf{} nearly matches early fusion across three face-sequence aggregators; the Transformer variant reaches 0.5983 \wf{}, compared with 0.6018 for early fusion and 0.4598 for probability-average late fusion. McNemar testing shows no significant difference between sum-abs \xgaf{} and early fusion on MELD ($p=1.000$), while \xgaf{} remains significantly better than late fusion ($p<0.0001$). On CMU-MOSEI 3-class sentiment recognition, sum-abs \xgaf{} reaches 0.6519 \wf{}, slightly exceeding early fusion (0.6485) and late fusion (0.5696). Ablation studies show that the main gain comes from adding cross-modal experts, especially the trimodal expert, rather than from complex per-sample routing. Diagnostics further show that mean-abs and median-abs weights are nearly uniform, while sum-abs weights concentrate on the trimodal expert. Thus, the main contribution is a transparent empirical analysis of how SHAP reduction, expert dimensionality, and cross-modal expert design affect modular multimodal fusion.

Botnets pose a significant cybersecurity threat, enabling attacks such as DDoS, data theft, and service disruptions on IoT devices. These devices often lack built-in botnet traffic filtering, leaving them highly exposed. Existing AI-based solutions improve detection capabilities but have limitations: (i) they are too heavy for IoT deployment, and (ii) they lack unlearning capabilities to forget sensitive or outdated features without retraining. To address these challenges, we propose DiRLU, a lightweight, reinforcement learning driven framework, while ensuring privacy by selectively unlearning sensitive or outdated features without requiring retraining. The framework leverages knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from a teacher model into a lightweight student model, with both models trained using A2C. A post-hoc unlearning mechanism modifies weights to remove targeted features, while restored features show negligible performance loss, confirming reversibility. Unlike many benchmark models that used only 5% of the BoT-IoT dataset, this research leverages 25%, allowing us to develop a strong teacher model. Both the teacher and student models were trained using the A2C reinforcement learning algorithm, achieving impressive results, with the student model achieving 99.60% accuracy and a 99.80% F1 score. To enhance transparency, we integrated Explainable AI (XAI), particularly LIME, which helps interpret the model's decisions and identify the key features influencing its predictions. Moreover, DiRLU requires only 2,370 FLOPS, approximately 3.87x more efficient than the state-of-the-art model, highlighting its efficiency for edge deployment. DiRLU combines efficiency with privacy, aligning with GDPR standards (right to be forgotten) to provide practical and scalable IoT security solution.

ExplAIner: A Declarative Query Language for Explaining Classification Models

Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barceló, Diego Bustamante +3

The XAI community has studied a wide range of queries and scores for explaining predictions of ML models. From a data management perspective, this proliferation of explanation notions calls for declarative query languages in which such notions can be specified, combined, and analyzed uniformly. In this paper, we develop such a framework for Boolean models. We first revisit FOIL, an interpretability query language for black-box models, and show that it has two fundamental limitations: it cannot express central optimality-based explanation queries, and its evaluation problem over decision trees is hard for every level of the polynomial hierarchy. We then introduce ExplAIner, a query language based on FOIL with an extended vocabulary and a layered structure. We show that ExplAIner can express a broad family of explanation notions, including abductive, contrastive, feature-based, and distance-based queries. We also prove that the evaluation problem for each query in ExplAIner belongs to the Boolean hierarchy over every class of Boolean models for which some basic predicates can be evaluated in polynomial time. In particular, that property holds for deterministic and decomposable Boolean circuits. Finally, we introduce Opt-FOIL, an optimization-oriented fragment of ExplAIner for computing explanations that are minimal with respect to strict partial orders, and prove that its evaluation problem is in $\mathrm{FP}^{\mathrm{NP}}$ under the same tractability assumptions. These complexity results have a direct algorithmic consequence: a fixed ExplAIner query can be evaluated with a fixed number of calls to a SAT solver, while a notion of explanation specified in Opt-FOIL can be computed with a polynomial number of such calls. This is particularly relevant in formal XAI, where SAT solvers have been successfully used to compute explanations for several classes of ML models.

AI-mediated communication is increasingly being utilized to help facilitate interactions; however, in privacy sensitive domains, an AI mediator has the additional challenge of considering how to preserve privacy. In these contexts, a mediator may redact or withhold information, raising questions about how users perceive these interventions and whether explanations of system behavior can improve trust. In this work, we investigate how explanations of redaction operations can affect user trust in AI-mediated communication. We devise a scenario where a validated system removes sensitive content from messages and generates explanations of varying detail to communicate its decisions to recipients. We then conduct a user study with 180 participants that studies how user trust and preferences vary for cases with different amounts of redacted content and different levels of explanation detail. Our results show that participants believed our system was more effective at preserving privacy when explanations were provided (p<0.05, Cohen's d ~ 0.3). We also found that contextual factors had an impact; participants relied more on explanations and found them more helpful when the system performed extensive redactions (p<0.05, Cohen's f ~ 0.2). We also found that explanation preferences depended on individual differences as well, and factors such as age and baseline familiarity with AI affected user trust in our system. These findings highlight the importance and challenge of balancing transparency and privacy in AI-mediated communications and suggest that adaptive, context-aware explanations are essential for designing privacy-aware, trustworthy AI systems.

Graph eXplainable AI (G-XAI) is increasingly important for making Graph Neural Networks interpretable and accountable. While a growing number of explainers are available, choosing the right method and assessing the trustworthiness of its outputs remains unclear. Consistent evaluation practices and actionable guidance are still missing, hindering practical adoption. In this paper, we introduce a unified, quantitative benchmarking framework for G-XAI that requires no ground-truth assumptions. We formalize tabular explainability metrics for graph data, evaluating topological structure and node features as independent components. Our large-scale benchmarking study identifies explainers that consistently lie on the Pareto front across metric pairs and tasks, establishing robustly non-dominated solutions - while confirming that no single explainer achieves universal superiority. We distill our findings into actionable G-XAI usability guidelines to support Machine Learning practitioners in evaluating and deploying trustworthy GNN-based pipelines.

Transformers follow implicit curricula whereby some tasks are learned before others. However, how explicit pretraining curricula influence learning, generalization, and the selectivity of fine-tuning is unclear. This is important for AI safety, where fine-tuning is used to selectively suppress misaligned behaviors. Here, we compare curricula that pretrain tasks in a balanced (sampled uniformly) or an imbalanced (one task early, the other late) fashion. We show that imbalanced learning of two conflicting copy tasks promotes in-context learning and improves the selectivity of refusal fine-tuning. Ablations and activation patching show that this occurs because imbalanced pretraining encourages tasks to be disentangled in separable neural circuits, whereas balanced training routes both tasks through a common pathway. We extend these findings to a synthetic language learning task involving rule-consistent and rule-violating data, where imbalanced curricula similarly lead to more localized, less entangled rule representations, resulting in more robust rule-following behavior. Together, these results suggest that imbalanced pretraining curricula may be an important tool for promoting disentangled representations, with direct consequences for the precision and reliability of safety fine-tuning.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocols currently rely on heuristic, utilization-based bonding curves that mandate severe over-collateralization, systematically excluding under-collateralized assets like corporate invoices. This paper introduces a mathematically optimal pricing mechanism for decentralized credit: the Reverse Kelly Automated Market Maker (rkAMM), the core engine of our proposed lending framework. By inverting the Kelly Criterion, traditionally used for optimal bet sizing, we construct a dynamic interest rate discovery protocol that explicitly prices individual loan risk. The rkAMM ingests real-time Probability of Default (PD) streams from an off-chain Explainable AI oracle and dynamically calculates the exact interest rate required to sustain target liquidity provider (LP) yields. We mathematically derive the Reverse Kelly pricing function ($r = \frac{y + PD}{1 - PD}$), proving its strictly convex superiority over Aave and Compound's static utilization curves in managing capital efficiency. Furthermore, we deploy the rkAMM architecture via Solidity smart contracts, optimizing for gas-efficient 1e18 (WAD) floating-point arithmetic. To ensure decentralized transparency, our simulation infrastructure leverages MLflow for tracking yield hyperparameters, Data Version Control (DVC) linked to DagsHub for versioning Real-World Asset (RWA) data arrays, and localized edge-inference via Ollama (Llama-3) and Hugging Face (FinBERT) for zero-cost predictive modeling. Monte Carlo simulations across 10,000 macroeconomic stress scenarios confirm that the rkAMM maintains protocol solvency and stabilizes LP yields at 12-15\% net of expected credit losses. This work provides the foundational financial engineering required to bridge the \$2 trillion global supply chain finance gap using permissionless blockchain infrastructure.