Research Papers

The debate between self-interpretable models and post-hoc explanations for black-box models is central to Explainable AI (XAI). Self-interpretable models, such as concept-based networks, offer insights by connecting decisions to human-understandable concepts but often struggle with performance and scalability. Conversely, post-hoc methods like Shapley values, while theoretically robust, are computationally expensive and resource-intensive. To bridge the gap between these two lines of research, we propose a novel method that combines their strengths, providing theoretically guaranteed self-interpretability for black-box models without compromising prediction accuracy. Specifically, we introduce a parameter-efficient pipeline, AutoGnothi, which integrates a small side network into the black-box model, allowing it to generate Shapley value explanations without changing the original network parameters. This side-tuning approach significantly reduces memory, training, and inference costs, outperforming traditional parameter-efficient methods, where full fine-tuning serves as the optimal baseline. AutoGnothi enables the black-box model to predict and explain its predictions with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments show that AutoGnothi offers accurate explanations for both vision and language tasks, delivering superior computational efficiency with comparable interpretability.

The widespread and diverse online media platforms and other internet-driven communication technologies have presented significant challenges in defining the boundaries of freedom of expression. Consequently, the internet has been transformed into a potential cyber weapon. Within this evolving landscape, two particularly hazardous phenomena have emerged: fake news and doxxing. Although these threats have been subjects of extensive scholarly analysis, the crossroads where they intersect remain unexplored. This research addresses this convergence by introducing a novel system. The Fake News and Doxxing Detection with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (FNDEX) system leverages the capabilities of three distinct transformer models to achieve high-performance detection for both fake news and doxxing. To enhance data security, a rigorous three-step anonymization process is employed, rooted in a pattern-based approach for anonymizing personally identifiable information. Finally, this research emphasizes the importance of generating coherent explanations for the outcomes produced by both detection models. Our experiments on realistic datasets demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms the existing baselines

AI systems increasingly shape critical decisions across personal and societal domains. While empirical risk minimization (ERM) drives much of the AI success, it typically prioritizes accuracy over trustworthiness, often resulting in biases, opacity, and other adverse effects. This paper discusses how key requirements for trustworthy AI can be translated into design choices for the components of ERM. We hope to provide actionable guidance for building AI systems that meet emerging standards for trustworthiness of AI.

As AI systems, particularly generative models, increasingly influence decision-making, ensuring that they are able to fairly represent diverse human preferences becomes crucial. This paper introduces a novel framework for evaluating epistemic fairness in preference learning models inspired by economic theories of inequality and Rawlsian justice. We propose metrics adapted from the Gini Coefficient, Atkinson Index, and Kuznets Ratio to quantify fairness in these models. We validate our approach using two datasets: a custom visual preference dataset (AI-EDI-Space) and the Jester Jokes dataset. Our analysis reveals variations in model performance across users, highlighting potential epistemic injustices. We explore pre-processing and in-processing techniques to mitigate these inequalities, demonstrating a complex relationship between model efficiency and fairness. This work contributes to AI ethics by providing a framework for evaluating and improving epistemic fairness in preference learning models, offering insights for developing more inclusive AI systems in contexts where diverse human preferences are crucial.

While deep learning has been successfully applied to the data-driven classification of anomalous diffusion mechanisms, how the algorithm achieves the feat still remains a mystery. In this study, we use a well-known technique aimed at achieving explainable AI, namely the Gradient-weighted Class Activation Map (Grad-CAM), to investigate how deep learning (implemented by ResNets) recognizes the distinctive features of a particular anomalous diffusion model from the raw trajectory data. Our results show that Grad-CAM reveals the portions of the trajectory that hold crucial information about the underlying mechanism of anomalous diffusion, which can be utilized to enhance the robustness of the trained classifier against the measurement noise. Moreover, we observe that deep learning distills unique statistical characteristics of different diffusion mechanisms at various spatiotemporal scales, with larger-scale (smaller-scale) features identified at higher (lower) layers.

In the last two decades, Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL) has been proved to be very useful in modeling strategic reasoning for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, this logic struggles to capture the bounded rationality inherent in human decision-making processes. To overcome these limitations, Natural Alternating-time Temporal Logic (NatATL) has been recently introduced. As an extension of ATL, NatATL incorporates bounded memory constraints into agents' strategies, which allows to resemble human cognitive limitations. In this paper, we present a model checker tool for NatATL specifications - both for memoryless strategies and strategies with recall - integrated into VITAMIN, an open-source model checker designed specifically for MAS verification. By embedding NatATL into VITAMIN, we transform theoretical advancements into a practical verification framework, enabling comprehensive analysis and validation of strategic reasoning in complex multi-agent environments. Our novel tool paves the way for applications in areas such as explainable AI and human-in-the-loop systems, highlighting NatATL's substantial potential.

Despite the transformative impact of deep learning across multiple domains, the inherent opacity of these models has driven the development of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Among these efforts, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have emerged as a key approach to improve interpretability by leveraging high-level semantic information. However, CBMs, like other machine learning models, are susceptible to security threats, particularly backdoor attacks, which can covertly manipulate model behaviors. Understanding that the community has not yet studied the concept level backdoor attack of CBM, because of "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know.", we introduce CAT (Concept-level Backdoor ATtacks), a methodology that leverages the conceptual representations within CBMs to embed triggers during training, enabling controlled manipulation of model predictions at inference time. An enhanced attack pattern, CAT+, incorporates a correlation function to systematically select the most effective and stealthy concept triggers, thereby optimizing the attack's impact. Our comprehensive evaluation framework assesses both the attack success rate and stealthiness, demonstrating that CAT and CAT+ maintain high performance on clean data while achieving significant targeted effects on backdoored datasets. This work underscores the potential security risks associated with CBMs and provides a robust testing methodology for future security assessments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become tightly integrated into modern technology, yet existing exploratory visualizations for explainable AI (XAI) are primarily designed for users with technical expertise. This leaves everyday users, who also regularly interact with AI systems, with limited resources to explore or understand AI technologies they use. We propose a novel framework that enables non-technical users to collect insights by conversing directly with visualization elements via LLM-powered narrative gamifications. We implemented a prototype that utilizes such gamification to facilitate non-technical users' exploration of AI embedding projections. We conducted a comparative study with 10 participants to assess our prototype quantitatively and qualitatively. Our study results indicate that although our prototype effectively enhances non-technical users' AI/XAI knowledge, and users believe they learn more through the gamification feature, it remains inconclusive whether the gamification itself leads to further improvements in understanding. In addition, opinions among participants regarding the framework's engagement are mixed: some believe it enhances their exploration of the visualizations, while others feel it disrupts their workflow.

Easydiagnos: a framework for accurate feature selection for automatic diagnosis in smart healthcare

Prasenjit Maji, Amit Kumar Mondal, Hemanta Kumar Mondal +1

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have revolutionized smart healthcare, driving innovations in wearable technologies, continuous monitoring devices, and intelligent diagnostic systems. However, security, explainability, robustness, and performance optimization challenges remain critical barriers to widespread adoption in clinical environments. This research presents an innovative algorithmic method using the Adaptive Feature Evaluator (AFE) algorithm to improve feature selection in healthcare datasets and overcome problems. AFE integrating Genetic Algorithms (GA), Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), and Permutation Combination Techniques (PCT), the algorithm optimizes Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), thereby enhancing predictive accuracy and interpretability. The proposed method is validated across three diverse healthcare datasets using six distinct machine learning algorithms, demonstrating its robustness and superiority over conventional feature selection techniques. The results underscore the transformative potential of AFE in smart healthcare, enabling personalized and transparent patient care. Notably, the AFE algorithm, when combined with a Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), achieved an accuracy of up to 98.5%, highlighting its capability to improve clinical decision-making processes in real-world healthcare applications.

The application of Shapley values to high-dimensional, time-series-like data is computationally challenging - and sometimes impossible. For $N$ inputs the problem is $2^N$ hard. In image processing, clusters of pixels, referred to as superpixels, are used to streamline computations. This research presents an efficient solution for time-seres-like data that adapts the idea of superpixels for Shapley value computation. Motivated by a forensic DNA classification example, the method is applied to multivariate time-series-like data whose features have been classified by a convolutional neural network (CNN). In DNA processing, it is important to identify alleles from the background noise created by DNA extraction and processing. A single DNA profile has $31,200$ scan points to classify, and the classification decisions must be defensible in a court of law. This means that classification is routinely performed by human readers - a monumental and time consuming process. The application of a CNN with fast computation of meaningful Shapley values provides a potential alternative to the classification. This research demonstrates the realistic, accurate and fast computation of Shapley values for this massive task

Towards User-Focused Research in Training Data Attribution for Human-Centered Explainable AI

Elisa Nguyen, Johannes Bertram, Evgenii Kortukov +2

Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make AI systems more transparent, yet many practices emphasise mathematical rigour over practical user needs. We propose an alternative to this model-centric approach by following a design thinking process for the emerging XAI field of training data attribution (TDA), which risks repeating solutionist patterns seen in other subfields. However, because TDA is in its early stages, there is a valuable opportunity to shape its direction through user-centred practices. We engage directly with machine learning developers via a needfinding interview study (N=6) and a scenario-based interactive user study (N=31) to ground explanations in real workflows. Our exploration of the TDA design space reveals novel tasks for data-centric explanations useful to developers, such as grouping training samples behind specific model behaviours or identifying undersampled data. We invite the TDA, XAI, and HCI communities to engage with these tasks to strengthen their research's practical relevance and human impact.

Time series forecasting, while vital in various applications, often employs complex models that are difficult for humans to understand. Effective explainable AI techniques are crucial to bridging the gap between model predictions and user understanding. This paper presents a framework - TSFeatLIME, extending TSLIME, tailored specifically for explaining univariate time series forecasting. TSFeatLIME integrates an auxiliary feature into the surrogate model and considers the pairwise Euclidean distances between the queried time series and the generated samples to improve the fidelity of the surrogate models. However, the usefulness of such explanations for human beings remains an open question. We address this by conducting a user study with 160 participants through two interactive interfaces, aiming to measure how individuals from different backgrounds can simulate or predict model output changes in the treatment group and control group. Our results show that the surrogate model under the TSFeatLIME framework is able to better simulate the behaviour of the black-box considering distance, without sacrificing accuracy. In addition, the user study suggests that the explanations were significantly more effective for participants without a computer science background.