Research Papers

The desirable properties of explanations in information systems have fueled the demands for transparency in artificial intelligence (AI) outputs. To address these demands, the field of explainable AI (XAI) has put forth methods that can support human decision-making by explaining AI outputs. However, current empirical works present inconsistent findings on whether such explanations help to improve users' task performance in decision support systems (DSS). In this paper, we conduct a meta-analysis to explore how XAI affects human performance in classification tasks. Our results show an improvement in task performance through XAI-based decision support, though explanations themselves are not the decisive driver for this improvement. The analysis reveals that the studies' risk of bias moderates the effect of explanations in AI, while the explanation type appears to play only a negligible role. Our findings contribute to the human computer interaction field by enhancing the understanding of human-XAI collaboration in DSS.

Explainable AI Components for Narrative Map Extraction

Brian Keith, Fausto German, Eric Krokos +2

As narrative extraction systems grow in complexity, establishing user trust through interpretable and explainable outputs becomes increasingly critical. This paper presents an evaluation of an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) system for narrative map extraction that provides meaningful explanations across multiple levels of abstraction. Our system integrates explanations based on topical clusters for low-level document relationships, connection explanations for event relationships, and high-level structure explanations for overall narrative patterns. In particular, we evaluate the XAI system through a user study involving 10 participants that examined narratives from the 2021 Cuban protests. The analysis of results demonstrates that participants using the explanations made the users trust in the system's decisions, with connection explanations and important event detection proving particularly effective at building user confidence. Survey responses indicate that the multi-level explanation approach helped users develop appropriate trust in the system's narrative extraction capabilities. This work advances the state-of-the-art in explainable narrative extraction while providing practical insights for developing reliable narrative extraction systems that support effective human-AI collaboration.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain autonomous capabilities, their coordination in multi-agent settings becomes increasingly important. However, they often struggle with cooperation, leading to suboptimal outcomes. Inspired by Axelrod's Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) tournaments, we explore how personality traits influence LLM cooperation. Using representation engineering, we steer Big Five traits (e.g., Agreeableness, Conscientiousness) in LLMs and analyze their impact on IPD decision-making. Our results show that higher Agreeableness and Conscientiousness improve cooperation but increase susceptibility to exploitation, highlighting both the potential and limitations of personality-based steering for aligning AI agents.

This study proposes an autoencoder approach to extract latent features from cone penetration test profiles to evaluate the potential of incorporating CPT data in an AI model. We employ autoencoders to compress 200 CPT profiles of soil behavior type index (Ic) and normalized cone resistance (qc1Ncs) into ten latent features while preserving critical information. We then utilize the extracted latent features with site parameters to train XGBoost models for predicting lateral spreading occurrences in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Models using the latent CPT features outperformed models with conventional CPT metrics or no CPT data, achieving over 83% accuracy. Explainable AI revealed the most crucial latent feature corresponding to soil behavior between 1-3 meter depths, highlighting this depth range's criticality for liquefaction evaluation. The autoencoder approach provides an automated technique for condensing CPT profiles into informative latent features for machine-learning liquefaction models.

User profiling, the practice of collecting user information for personalized recommendations, has become widespread, driving progress in technology. However, this growth poses a threat to user privacy, as devices often collect sensitive data without their owners' awareness. This article aims to consolidate knowledge on user profiling, exploring various approaches and associated challenges. Through the lens of two companies sharing user data and an analysis of 18 popular Android applications in India across various categories, including $\textit{Social, Education, Entertainment, Travel, Shopping and Others}$, the article unveils privacy vulnerabilities. Further, the article propose an enhanced machine learning framework, employing decision trees and neural networks, that improves state-of-the-art classifiers in detecting personal information exposure. Leveraging the XAI (explainable artificial intelligence) algorithm LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), it enhances interpretability, crucial for reliably identifying sensitive data. Results demonstrate a noteworthy performance boost, achieving a $75.01\%$ accuracy with a reduced training time of $3.62$ seconds for neural networks. Concluding, the paper suggests research directions to strengthen digital security measures.

In recent years, network slicing has embraced artificial intelligence (AI) models to manage the growing complexity of communication networks. In such a situation, AI-driven zero-touch network automation should present a high degree of flexibility and viability, especially when deployed in live production networks. However, centralized controllers suffer from high data communication overhead due to the vast amount of user data, and most network slices are reluctant to share private data. In federated learning systems, selecting trustworthy clients to participate in training is critical for ensuring system performance and reliability. The present paper proposes a new approach to client selection by leveraging an XAI method to guarantee scalable and fast operation of federated learning based analytic engines that implement slice-level resource provisioning at the RAN-Edge in a non-IID scenario. Attributions from XAI are used to guide the selection of devices participating in training. This approach enhances network trustworthiness for users and addresses the black-box nature of neural network models. The simulations conducted outperformed the standard approach in terms of both convergence time and computational cost, while also demonstrating high scalability.

GENEOnet: Statistical analysis supporting explainability and trustworthiness

Giovanni Bocchi, Patrizio Frosini, Alessandra Micheletti +5

Group Equivariant Non-Expansive Operators (GENEOs) have emerged as mathematical tools for constructing networks for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Recent findings suggest that such models can be inserted within the domain of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) due to their inherent interpretability. In this study, we aim to verify this claim with respect to GENEOnet, a GENEO network developed for an application in computational biochemistry by employing various statistical analyses and experiments. Such experiments first allow us to perform a sensitivity analysis on GENEOnet's parameters to test their significance. Subsequently, we show that GENEOnet exhibits a significantly higher proportion of equivariance compared to other methods. Lastly, we demonstrate that GENEOnet is on average robust to perturbations arising from molecular dynamics. These results collectively serve as proof of the explainability, trustworthiness, and robustness of GENEOnet and confirm the beneficial use of GENEOs in the context of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.

Dubito Ergo Sum: Exploring AI Ethics

Viktor Dorfler, Giles Cuthbert

We paraphrase Descartes' famous dictum in the area of AI ethics where the "I doubt and therefore I am" is suggested as a necessary aspect of morality. Therefore AI, which cannot doubt itself, cannot possess moral agency. Of course, this is not the end of the story. We explore various aspects of the human mind that substantially differ from AI, which includes the sensory grounding of our knowing, the act of understanding, and the significance of being able to doubt ourselves. The foundation of our argument is the discipline of ethics, one of the oldest and largest knowledge projects of human history, yet, we seem only to be beginning to get a grasp of it. After a couple of thousand years of studying the ethics of humans, we (humans) arrived at a point where moral psychology suggests that our moral decisions are intuitive, and all the models from ethics become relevant only when we explain ourselves. This recognition has a major impact on what and how we can do regarding AI ethics. We do not offer a solution, we explore some ideas and leave the problem open, but we hope somewhat better understood than before our study.

Comprehensive forecasts of space tourism demand are crucial for businesses to optimize strategies and customer experiences in this burgeoning industry. Traditional methods struggle to capture the complex factors influencing an individual's decision to travel to space. In this paper, we propose an explainable and trustworthy artificial intelligence framework to address the challenge of predicting space tourism demand by following the National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines. We develop a novel machine learning network, called SpaceNet, capable of learning wide-range dependencies in data and allowing us to analyze the relationships between various factors such as age, income, and risk tolerance. We investigate space travel demand in the US, categorizing it into four types: no travel, moon travel, suborbital, and orbital travel. To this end, we collected 1860 data points in many states and cities with different ages and then conducted our experiment with the data. From our experiments, the SpaceNet achieves an average ROC-AUC of 0.82 $\pm$ 0.088, indicating strong classification performance. Our investigation demonstrated that travel price, age, annual income, gender, and fatality probability are important features in deciding whether a person wants to travel or not. Beyond demand forecasting, we use explainable AI to provide interpretation for the travel-type decisions of an individual, offering insights into the factors driving interest in space travel, which is not possible with traditional classification methods. This knowledge enables businesses to tailor marketing strategies and optimize service offerings in this rapidly evolving market. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to implement an explainable and interpretable AI framework for investigating the factors influencing space tourism.

This review systematically examines deep learning applications in financial asset management. Unlike prior reviews, this study focuses on identifying emerging trends, such as the integration of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and their transformative potential. It highlights new developments, including hybrid models (e.g., transformer-based architectures) and the growing use of alternative data sources such as ESG indicators and sentiment analysis. These advancements challenge traditional financial paradigms and set the stage for a deeper understanding of the evolving landscape. We use the Scopus database to select the most relevant articles published from 2018 to 2023. The inclusion criteria encompassed articles that explicitly apply deep learning models within financial asset management. We excluded studies focused on physical assets. This review also outlines our methodology for evaluating the relevance and impact of the included studies, including data sources and analytical methods. Our search identified 934 articles, with 612 meeting the inclusion criteria based on their focus and methodology. The synthesis of results from these articles provides insights into the effectiveness of deep learning models in improving portfolio performance and price forecasting accuracy. The review highlights the broad applicability and potential enhancements deep learning offers to financial asset management. Despite some limitations due to the scope of model application and variation in methodological rigour, the overall evidence supports deep learning as a valuable tool in this field. Our systematic review underscores the progressive integration of deep learning in financial asset management, suggesting a trajectory towards more sophisticated and impactful applications.

In recent years, Large Language Models have attracted growing interest for their significant potential, though concerns have rapidly emerged regarding unsafe behaviors stemming from inherent stereotypes and biases. Most research on stereotypes in LLMs has primarily relied on indirect evaluation setups, in which models are prompted to select between pairs of sentences associated with particular social groups. Recently, direct evaluation methods have emerged, examining open-ended model responses to overcome limitations of previous approaches, such as annotator biases. Most existing studies have focused on English-centric LLMs, whereas research on non-English models, particularly Japanese, remains sparse, despite the growing development and adoption of these models. This study examines the safety of Japanese LLMs when responding to stereotype-triggering prompts in direct setups. We constructed 3,612 prompts by combining 301 social group terms, categorized by age, gender, and other attributes, with 12 stereotype-inducing templates in Japanese. Responses were analyzed from three foundational models trained respectively on Japanese, English, and Chinese language. Our findings reveal that LLM-jp, a Japanese native model, exhibits the lowest refusal rate and is more likely to generate toxic and negative responses compared to other models. Additionally, prompt format significantly influence the output of all models, and the generated responses include exaggerated reactions toward specific social groups, varying across models. These findings underscore the insufficient ethical safety mechanisms in Japanese LLMs and demonstrate that even high-accuracy models can produce biased outputs when processing Japanese-language prompts. We advocate for improving safety mechanisms and bias mitigation strategies in Japanese LLMs, contributing to ongoing discussions on AI ethics beyond linguistic boundaries.

In this short paper we address issues related to building multimodal AI systems for human performance support in manufacturing domains. We make two contributions: we first identify challenges of participatory design and training of such systems, and secondly, to address such challenges, we propose the ACE paradigm: "Action and Control via Explanations". Specifically, we suggest that LLMs can be used to produce explanations in the form of human interpretable "semantic frames", which in turn enable end users to provide data the AI system needs to align its multimodal models and representations, including computer vision, automatic speech recognition, and document inputs. ACE, by using LLMs to "explain" using semantic frames, will help the human and the AI system to collaborate, together building a more accurate model of humans activities and behaviors, and ultimately more accurate predictive outputs for better task support, and better outcomes for human users performing manual tasks.