Research Papers

Companies regularly spend millions of dollars producing electronically-stored documents in legal matters. Recently, parties on both sides of the 'legal aisle' are accepting the use of machine learning techniques like text classification to cull massive volumes of data and to identify responsive documents for use in these matters. While text classification is regularly used to reduce the discovery costs in legal matters, it also faces a peculiar perception challenge: amongst lawyers, this technology is sometimes looked upon as a "black box", little information provided for attorneys to understand why documents are classified as responsive. In recent years, a group of AI and ML researchers have been actively researching Explainable AI, in which actions or decisions are human understandable. In legal document review scenarios, a document can be identified as responsive, if one or more of its text snippets are deemed responsive. In these scenarios, if text classification can be used to locate these snippets, then attorneys could easily evaluate the model's classification decision. When deployed with defined and explainable results, text classification can drastically enhance overall quality and speed of the review process by reducing the review time. Moreover, explainable predictive coding provides lawyers with greater confidence in the results of that supervised learning task. This paper describes a framework for explainable text classification as a valuable tool in legal services: for enhancing the quality and efficiency of legal document review and for assisting in locating responsive snippets within responsive documents. This framework has been implemented in our legal analytics product, which has been used in hundreds of legal matters. We also report our experimental results using the data from an actual legal matter that used this type of document review.

Algorithmic Bias in Recidivism Prediction: A Causal Perspective

Aria Khademi, Vasant Honavar

ProPublica's analysis of recidivism predictions produced by Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) software tool for the task, has shown that the predictions were racially biased against African American defendants. We analyze the COMPAS data using a causal reformulation of the underlying algorithmic fairness problem. Specifically, we assess whether COMPAS exhibits racial bias against African American defendants using FACT, a recently introduced causality grounded measure of algorithmic fairness. We use the Neyman-Rubin potential outcomes framework for causal inference from observational data to estimate FACT from COMPAS data. Our analysis offers strong evidence that COMPAS exhibits racial bias against African American defendants. We further show that the FACT estimates from COMPAS data are robust in the presence of unmeasured confounding.

Kandinsky Patterns

Heimo Mueller, Andreas Holzinger

Kandinsky Figures and Kandinsky Patterns are mathematically describable, simple self-contained hence controllable test data sets for the development, validation and training of explainability in artificial intelligence. Whilst Kandinsky Patterns have these computationally manageable properties, they are at the same time easily distinguishable from human observers. Consequently, controlled patterns can be described by both humans and computers. We define a Kandinsky Pattern as a set of Kandinsky Figures, where for each figure an "infallible authority" defines that the figure belongs to the Kandinsky Pattern. With this simple principle we build training and validation data sets for automatic interpretability and context learning. In this paper we describe the basic idea and some underlying principles of Kandinsky Patterns and provide a Github repository to invite the international machine learning research community to a challenge to experiment with our Kandinsky Patterns to expand and thus make progress in the field of explainable AI and to contribute to the upcoming field of explainability and causability.

This study establishes a novel framework for systematically evaluating the moral reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as they increasingly integrate into critical societal domains. Current assessment methodologies lack the precision needed to evaluate nuanced ethical decision-making in AI systems, creating significant accountability gaps. Our framework addresses this challenge by quantifying alignment with human ethical standards through three dimensions: foundational moral principles, reasoning robustness, and value consistency across diverse scenarios. This approach enables precise identification of ethical strengths and weaknesses in LLMs, facilitating targeted improvements and stronger alignment with societal values. To promote transparency and collaborative advancement in ethical AI development, we are publicly releasing both our benchmark datasets and evaluation codebase at https://github.com/ The-Responsible-AI-Initiative/LLM_Ethics_Benchmark.git.

This cross-sectional study investigates how preservice teachers in the Global South engage with Generative Artificial Intelligence across academic and instructional tasks while navigating infrastructural barriers such as limited internet access and high data costs. The study surveyed 167 preservice teachers from four teacher education institutions in Ghana. Descriptive statistics and inferential analyses, including multiple and ordinal logistic regressions, were used to examine patterns of GenAI use. Findings show that preservice teachers rely on GenAI as a learning companion for locating reading materials, accessing detailed content explanations, and identifying practical examples. They also use GenAI as a teaching assistant for tasks related to lesson preparation, including generating instructional resources, identifying assessment strategies, and developing lesson objectives. Usage patterns indicate that students in their third and fourth years have significantly higher frequencies of GenAI use compared to those in earlier years. Gender was not a significant predictor of GenAI adoption, in contrast to class level and age. Participants reported positive attitudes toward GenAI, noting that it supports autonomous learning and reduces dependence on peers and instructors for routine academic and teaching activities. However, challenges such as high data costs, occasional inaccuracies in GenAI outputs, and concerns about academic dishonesty were identified as factors that limit more frequent use. The study recommends the integration of GenAI literacy in teacher education programs, with a focus on ethical and responsible AI use to support equitable adoption in the Global South.

Many guidelines for responsible AI have been suggested to help AI practitioners in the development of ethical and responsible AI systems. However, these guidelines are often neither grounded in regulation nor usable by different roles, from developers to decision makers. To bridge this gap, we developed a four-step method to generate a list of responsible AI guidelines; these steps are: (1) manual coding of 17 papers on responsible AI; (2) compiling an initial catalog of responsible AI guidelines; (3) refining the catalog through interviews and expert panels; and (4) finalizing the catalog. To evaluate the resulting 22 guidelines, we incorporated them into an interactive tool and assessed them in a user study with 14 AI researchers, engineers, designers, and managers from a large technology company. Through interviews with these practitioners, we found that the guidelines were grounded in current regulations and usable across roles, encouraging self-reflection on ethical considerations at early stages of development. This significantly contributes to the concept of `Responsible AI by Design' -- a design-first approach that embeds responsible AI values throughout the development lifecycle and across various business roles.

Understanding intermediate layers of a deep learning model and discovering the driving features of stimuli have attracted much interest, recently. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) provides a new way to open an AI black box and makes a transparent and interpretable decision. This paper proposes a new explainable convolutional neural network (XCNN) which represents important and driving visual features of stimuli in an end-to-end model architecture. This network employs encoder-decoder neural networks in a CNN architecture to represent regions of interest in an image based on its category. The proposed model is trained without localization labels and generates a heat-map as part of the network architecture without extra post-processing steps. The experimental results on the CIFAR-10, Tiny ImageNet, and MNIST datasets showed the success of our algorithm (XCNN) to make CNNs explainable. Based on visual assessment, the proposed model outperforms the current algorithms in class-specific feature representation and interpretable heatmap generation while providing a simple and flexible network architecture. The initial success of this approach warrants further study to enhance weakly supervised localization and semantic segmentation in explainable frameworks.

The growing influence and decision-making capacities of Autonomous systems and Artificial Intelligence in our lives force us to consider the values embedded in these systems. But how ethics should be implemented into these systems? In this study, the solution is seen on philosophical conceptualization as a framework to form practical implementation model for ethics of AI. To take the first steps on conceptualization main concepts used on the field needs to be identified. A keyword based Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) on the keywords used in AI and ethics was conducted to help in identifying, defying and comparing main concepts used in current AI ethics discourse. Out of 1062 papers retrieved SMS discovered 37 re-occurring keywords in 83 academic papers. We suggest that the focus on finding keywords is the first step in guiding and providing direction for future research in the AI ethics field.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) speech generation and voice cloning technologies have produced naturalistic speech and accurate voice replication, yet their influence on sociotechnical systems across diverse accents and linguistic traits is not fully understood. This study evaluates two synthetic AI voice services (Speechify and ElevenLabs) through a mixed methods approach using surveys and interviews to assess technical performance and uncover how users' lived experiences influence their perceptions of accent variations in these speech technologies. Our findings reveal technical performance disparities across five regional, English-language accents and demonstrate how current speech generation technologies may inadvertently reinforce linguistic privilege and accent-based discrimination, potentially creating new forms of digital exclusion. Overall, our study highlights the need for inclusive design and regulation by providing actionable insights for developers, policymakers, and organizations to ensure equitable and socially responsible AI speech technologies.

Recent research has developed a number of eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as gradient-based approaches, input perturbation-base methods, and black-box explanation methods. While these XAI techniques can extract meaningful insights from deep learning models, how to properly evaluate them remains an open problem. The most widely used approach is to perturb or even remove what the XAI method considers to be the most important features in an input and observe the changes in the output prediction. This approach, although straightforward, suffers the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problem as the perturbed samples may no longer follow the original data distribution. A recent method RemOve And Retrain (ROAR) solves the OOD issue by retraining the model with perturbed samples guided by explanations. However, using the model retrained based on XAI methods to evaluate these explainers may cause information leakage and thus lead to unfair comparisons. We propose Fine-tuned Fidelity (F-Fidelity), a robust evaluation framework for XAI, which utilizes i) an explanation-agnostic fine-tuning strategy, thus mitigating the information leakage issue, and ii) a random masking operation that ensures that the removal step does not generate an OOD input. We also design controlled experiments with state-of-the-art (SOTA) explainers and their degraded version to verify the correctness of our framework. We conduct experiments on multiple data modalities, such as images, time series, and natural language. The results demonstrate that F-Fidelity significantly improves upon prior evaluation metrics in recovering the ground-truth ranking of the explainers. Furthermore, we show both theoretically and empirically that, given a faithful explainer, F-Fidelity metric can be used to compute the sparsity of influential input components, i.e., to extract the true explanation size.

AI Audit: A Card Game to Reflect on Everyday AI Systems

Safinah Ali, Vishesh Kumar, Cynthia Breazeal

An essential element of K-12 AI literacy is educating learners about the ethical and societal implications of AI systems. Previous work in AI ethics literacy have developed curriculum and classroom activities that engage learners in reflecting on the ethical implications of AI systems and developing responsible AI. There is little work in using game-based learning methods in AI literacy. Games are known to be compelling media to teach children about complex STEM concepts. In this work, we developed a competitive card game for middle and high school students called "AI Audit" where they play as AI start-up founders building novel AI-powered technology. Players can challenge other players with potential harms of their technology or defend their own businesses by features that mitigate these harms. The game mechanics reward systems that are ethically developed or that take steps to mitigate potential harms. In this paper, we present the game design, teacher resources for classroom deployment and early playtesting results. We discuss our reflections about using games as teaching tools for AI literacy in K-12 classrooms.

Logic for Explainable AI

Adnan Darwiche

A central quest in explainable AI relates to understanding the decisions made by (learned) classifiers. There are three dimensions of this understanding that have been receiving significant attention in recent years. The first dimension relates to characterizing conditions on instances that are necessary and sufficient for decisions, therefore providing abstractions of instances that can be viewed as the "reasons behind decisions." The next dimension relates to characterizing minimal conditions that are sufficient for a decision, therefore identifying maximal aspects of the instance that are irrelevant to the decision. The last dimension relates to characterizing minimal conditions that are necessary for a decision, therefore identifying minimal perturbations to the instance that yield alternate decisions. We discuss in this tutorial a comprehensive, semantical and computational theory of explainability along these dimensions which is based on some recent developments in symbolic logic. The tutorial will also discuss how this theory is particularly applicable to non-symbolic classifiers such as those based on Bayesian networks, decision trees, random forests and some types of neural networks.