Research Papers

Explaining Explanations to Society

Leilani H. Gilpin, Cecilia Testart, Nathaniel Fruchter +1

There is a disconnect between explanatory artificial intelligence (XAI) methods and the types of explanations that are useful for and demanded by society (policy makers, government officials, etc.) Questions that experts in artificial intelligence (AI) ask opaque systems provide inside explanations, focused on debugging, reliability, and validation. These are different from those that society will ask of these systems to build trust and confidence in their decisions. Although explanatory AI systems can answer many questions that experts desire, they often don't explain why they made decisions in a way that is precise (true to the model) and understandable to humans. These outside explanations can be used to build trust, comply with regulatory and policy changes, and act as external validation. In this paper, we focus on XAI methods for deep neural networks (DNNs) because of DNNs' use in decision-making and inherent opacity. We explore the types of questions that explanatory DNN systems can answer and discuss challenges in building explanatory systems that provide outside explanations for societal requirements and benefit.

Assessing and understanding intelligent agents is a difficult task for users that lack an AI background. A relatively new area, called "Explainable AI," is emerging to help address this problem, but little is known about how users would forage through information an explanation system might offer. To inform the development of Explainable AI systems, we conducted a formative study, using the lens of Information Foraging Theory, into how experienced users foraged in the domain of StarCraft to assess an agent. Our results showed that participants faced difficult foraging problems. These foraging problems caused participants to entirely miss events that were important to them, reluctantly choose to ignore actions they did not want to ignore, and bear high cognitive, navigation, and information costs to access the information they needed.

As artificial intelligence (AI) advances in reasoning capabilities, most recently with the emergence of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), understanding how children conceptualize AI's reasoning processes becomes critical for fostering AI literacy. While one of the "Five Big Ideas" in AI education highlights reasoning algorithms as central to AI decision-making, less is known about children's mental models in this area. Through a two-phase approach, consisting of a co-design session with 8 children followed by a field study with 106 children (grades 3-8), we identified three models of AI reasoning: Deductive, Inductive, and Inherent. Our findings reveal that younger children (grades 3-5) often attribute AI's reasoning to inherent intelligence, while older children (grades 6-8) recognize AI as a pattern recognizer. We highlight three tensions that surfaced in children's understanding of AI reasoning and conclude with implications for scaffolding AI curricula and designing explainable AI tools.

Utilizing potent representations of the large vision-language models (VLMs) to accomplish various downstream tasks has attracted increasing attention. Within this research field, soft prompt learning has become a representative approach for efficiently adapting VLMs such as CLIP, to tasks like image classification. However, most existing prompt learning methods learn text tokens that are unexplainable, which cannot satisfy the stringent interpretability requirements of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in high-stakes scenarios like healthcare. To address this issue, we propose a novel explainable prompt learning framework that leverages medical knowledge by aligning the semantics of images, learnable prompts, and clinical concept-driven prompts at multiple granularities. Moreover, our framework addresses the lack of valuable concept annotations by eliciting knowledge from large language models and offers both visual and textual explanations for the prompts. Extensive experiments and explainability analyses conducted on various datasets, with and without concept labels, demonstrate that our method simultaneously achieves superior diagnostic performance, flexibility, and interpretability, shedding light on the effectiveness of foundation models in facilitating XAI. The code will be made publically available.

This review paper provides an integrated perspective of Explainable Artificial Intelligence techniques applied to Brain-Computer Interfaces. BCIs use predictive models to interpret brain signals for various high-stake applications. However, achieving explainability in these complex models is challenging as it compromises accuracy. The field of XAI has emerged to address the need for explainability across various stakeholders, but there is a lack of an integrated perspective in XAI for BCI (XAI4BCI) literature. It is necessary to differentiate key concepts like explainability, interpretability, and understanding in this context and formulate a comprehensive framework. To understand the need of XAI for BCI, we pose six key research questions for a systematic review and meta-analysis, encompassing its purposes, applications, usability, and technical feasibility. We employ the PRISMA methodology -- preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses to review (n=1246) and analyze (n=84) studies published in 2015 and onwards for key insights. The results highlight that current research primarily focuses on interpretability for developers and researchers, aiming to justify outcomes and enhance model performance. We discuss the unique approaches, advantages, and limitations of XAI4BCI from the literature. We draw insights from philosophy, psychology, and social sciences. We propose a design space for XAI4BCI, considering the evolving need to visualize and investigate predictive model outcomes customised for various stakeholders in the BCI development and deployment lifecycle. This paper is the first to focus solely on reviewing XAI4BCI research articles. This systematic review and meta-analysis findings with the proposed design space prompt important discussions on establishing standards for BCI explanations, highlighting current limitations, and guiding the future of XAI in BCI.

With the rising concern on model interpretability, the application of eXplainable AI (XAI) tools on deepfake detection models has been a topic of interest recently. In image classification tasks, XAI tools highlight pixels influencing the decision given by a model. This helps in troubleshooting the model and determining areas that may require further tuning of parameters. With a wide range of tools available in the market, choosing the right tool for a model becomes necessary as each one may highlight different sets of pixels for a given image. There is a need to evaluate different tools and decide the best performing ones among them. Generic XAI evaluation methods like insertion or removal of salient pixels/segments are applicable for general image classification tasks but may produce less meaningful results when applied on deepfake detection models due to their functionality. In this paper, we perform experiments to show that generic removal/insertion XAI evaluation methods are not suitable for deepfake detection models. We also propose and implement an XAI evaluation approach specifically suited for deepfake detection models.

Regional climate models (RCMs) are essential tools for simulating and studying regional climate variability and change. However, their high computational cost limits the production of comprehensive ensembles of regional climate projections covering multiple scenarios and driving Global Climate Models (GCMs) across regions. RCM emulators based on deep learning models have recently been introduced as a cost-effective and promising alternative that requires only short RCM simulations to train the models. Therefore, evaluating their transferability to different periods, scenarios, and GCMs becomes a pivotal and complex task in which the inherent biases of both GCMs and RCMs play a significant role. Here we focus on this problem by considering the two different emulation approaches proposed in the literature (PP and MOS, following the terminology introduced in this paper). In addition to standard evaluation techniques, we expand the analysis with methods from the field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), to assess the physical consistency of the empirical links learnt by the models. We find that both approaches are able to emulate certain climatological properties of RCMs for different periods and scenarios (soft transferability), but the consistency of the emulation functions differ between approaches. Whereas PP learns robust and physically meaningful patterns, MOS results are GCM-dependent and lack physical consistency in some cases. Both approaches face problems when transferring the emulation function to other GCMs, due to the existence of GCM-dependent biases (hard transferability). This limits their applicability to build ensembles of regional climate projections. We conclude by giving some prospects for future applications.

The transition to a sustainable energy supply challenges the operation of electric power systems in manifold ways. Transmission grid loads increase as wind and solar power are often installed far away from the consumers. In extreme cases, system operators must intervene via countertrading or redispatch to ensure grid stability. In this article, we provide a data-driven analysis of congestion in the German transmission grid. We develop an explainable machine learning model to predict the volume of redispatch and countertrade on an hourly basis. The model reveals factors that drive or mitigate grid congestion and quantifies their impact. We show that, as expected, wind power generation is the main driver, but hydropower and cross-border electricity trading also play an essential role. Solar power, on the other hand, has no mitigating effect. Our results suggest that a change to the market design would alleviate congestion.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays a crucial role in enabling human understanding and trust in deep learning systems. As models get larger, more ubiquitous, and pervasive in aspects of daily life, explainability is necessary to minimize adverse effects of model mistakes. Unfortunately, current approaches in human-centric XAI (e.g. predictive tasks in healthcare, education, or personalized ads) tend to rely on a single post-hoc explainer, whereas recent work has identified systematic disagreement between post-hoc explainers when applied to the same instances of underlying black-box models. In this paper, we therefore present a call for action to address the limitations of current state-of-the-art explainers. We propose a shift from post-hoc explainability to designing interpretable neural network architectures. We identify five needs of human-centric XAI (real-time, accurate, actionable, human-interpretable, and consistent) and propose two schemes for interpretable-by-design neural network workflows (adaptive routing with InterpretCC and temporal diagnostics with I2MD). We postulate that the future of human-centric XAI is neither in explaining black-boxes nor in reverting to traditional, interpretable models, but in neural networks that are intrinsically interpretable.

This study investigates the effectiveness of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques in predicting suicide risks and identifying the dominant causes for such behaviours. Data augmentation techniques and ML models are utilized to predict the associated risk. Furthermore, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and correlation analysis are used to rank the importance of variables in predictions. Experimental results indicate that Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models achieve the best results while DT has the best performance with an accuracy of 95:23% and an Area Under Curve (AUC) of 0.95. As per SHAP results, anger problems, depression, and social isolation are the leading variables in predicting the risk of suicide, and patients with good incomes, respected occupations, and university education have the least risk. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of machine learning and XAI framework for suicide risk prediction, and they can assist psychiatrists in understanding complex human behaviours and can also assist in reliable clinical decision-making.

Recently, eXplainable AI (XAI) research has focused on counterfactual explanations as post-hoc justifications for AI-system decisions (e.g. a customer refused a loan might be told: If you asked for a loan with a shorter term, it would have been approved). Counterfactuals explain what changes to the input-features of an AI system change the output-decision. However, there is a sub-type of counterfactual, semi-factuals, that have received less attention in AI (though the Cognitive Sciences have studied them extensively). This paper surveys these literatures to summarise historical and recent breakthroughs in this area. It defines key desiderata for semi-factual XAI and reports benchmark tests of historical algorithms (along with a novel, naieve method) to provide a solid basis for future algorithmic developments.

Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have great generalization and prediction capabilities, their functioning does not allow a detailed explanation of their behavior. Opaque deep learning models are increasingly used to make important predictions in critical environments, and the danger is that they make and use predictions that cannot be justified or legitimized. Several eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods that separate explanations from machine learning models have emerged, but have shortcomings in faithfulness to the model actual functioning and robustness. As a result, there is a widespread agreement on the importance of endowing Deep Learning models with explanatory capabilities so that they can themselves provide an answer to why a particular prediction was made. First, we address the problem of the lack of universal criteria for XAI by formalizing what an explanation is. We also introduced a set of axioms and definitions to clarify XAI from a mathematical perspective. Finally, we present the Greybox XAI, a framework that composes a DNN and a transparent model thanks to the use of a symbolic Knowledge Base (KB). We extract a KB from the dataset and use it to train a transparent model (i.e., a logistic regression). An encoder-decoder architecture is trained on RGB images to produce an output similar to the KB used by the transparent model. Once the two models are trained independently, they are used compositionally to form an explainable predictive model. We show how this new architecture is accurate and explainable in several datasets.