Research Papers

Large language model (LLM)-powered agents can be accurate on average yet unreliable in production, a discrepancy that has been observed but remains largely unaddressed. When given the same task five times, a ReAct agent on the AppWorld benchmark using GPT-4.1 succeeds in all five runs only 53% of the time, even though its per-run pass rate averages 77%. We call this 24-point shortfall the consistency gap, and we argue that addressing it is a precondition for trustworthy AI agent deployment. We present a self-evolving agent framework that reduces this gap by identifying unstable, low-consistency steps in agent trajectories and converting them into episodic memory the agent can draw on in future runs. At its core is a Consistency Analyzer that pinpoints where and why a trajectory is likely to flip across executions, and a Guideline Generator that converts the diagnosis into targeted guidelines, committed to memory and injected into future agent executions on similar tasks. On AppWorld with ReAct/GPT-4.1, our framework raises the fraction of tasks that succeed in all five runs by +16 points on same-task evaluation and +13 points on similar-task generalization.

Brain-age prediction models are commonly evaluated by predictive accuracy, yet accurate predictions alone do not establish that a model relies on reproducible or neurobiologically supported mechanisms. Post-hoc explanation methods can expose these mechanisms, but existing workflows typically stop at diagnosis or require correction targets to be specified before model analysis. We propose XAI-Refine, an automated explanation-knowledge loop for brain-age prediction from resting-state functional connectivity. At each iteration, XAI-Refine consolidates complementary post-hoc analyses across repeated training runs into reliable, structured model explanations. It converts each reliable explanation into a neutral neurobiological question, retrieves and verifies relevant literature, and compiles the verified evidence into an admissible set in the same typed explanation space. The target for refinement is defined as the minimal projection of the current model explanation onto the admissible set induced by applicable verified knowledge. This revised explanation is then translated into a differentiable constraint while preserving the originating model variable, measurement operator, and applicable scope. Candidate updates are promoted only when multi-seed validation confirms target-directed explanatory movement, predictive performance remains within a prespecified guardrail, and non-target explanatory drift remains bounded. Experiments on functional-connectivity-based brain-age prediction evaluate predictive performance, explanation reliability, literature alignment, and target-specific model revision, illustrating a structured route from post-hoc analysis to evidence-guided model refinement.

Evaluating the quality of explanations produced by explainable AI (XAI) methods remains challenging because existing approaches often rely on subjective human judgment, limiting reproducibility, scalability, and comparability between studies. We examine whether LLMs can serve as a reproducible and scalable mechanism to make comparative assessments of the quality of XAI explanations. We introduce XAI-Arena, an LLM-as-a-judge framework for scalable, reproducible, multidimensional, and stakeholder-sensitive evaluation of XAI explanation quality. XAI-Arena then allows us to compare XAI explanations along various dimensions, namely, perceived simplicity, clarity, task adequacy, trust calibration, actionability, transparency, faithfulness, and overall interpretability. We then benchmark XAI explanation methods across various datasets, machine learning models, and stakeholder personas. Human validation shows a strong positive association between LLM-generated and human ratings (Spearman's rho=.693, p<.001). Together, LLM-based evaluations can capture systematic differences in XAI explanation quality and provide a scalable and reproducible framework for comparative assessment of XAI explanations.

We observe a phenomenon that current algorithmic research in the field of explainable artificial intelligence primarily pursues better performance on several proxy metrics. On the one hand, these proxy metrics themselves are more or less flawed and cannot properly measure the quality of methods. On the other hand, metric-oriented research approaches often lead to the neglect of the rationality and interpretability of the methods themselves. Explainable artificial intelligence is abbreviated as XAI. The metric-driven research paradigm has resulted in a lack of interpretability of the relevant XAI methods themselves. Accordingly, there is a need for interpretability research on XAI methods, which can be playfully referred to as XXAI. This paper is one of our works on XXAI. This paper takes Generic Attention-model Explainability (GAE), a widely influential model interpretation method , or rather, XAI method that represents an important technical route, as the research object, and explores the real working mechanism and flaws of this method as well as the technical route it represents. Based on the conclusions of this study, it may be necessary to re-examine or verify GAE-related methods and their domain applications. We argue that GAE is an interpretation method that focuses on the attention process. After pointing out the working mechanism and flaws of GAE, we propose Cumulative Asset Holdings (CAH), a more reasonable Transformer interpretation method integrating both process-based and feature-based ideas from an economic zero-sum games perspective. In addition, it is worth noting that our method is applicable to models with special tokens, where existing methods may suffer from limitations. The model simplification research method and the analysis of additive operations adopted in this study may provide inspiration for other research works in XAI.

Post-hoc explanation methods are widely used to inspect image classifiers, but their reliability depends on design choices that are often treated as implementation details. We study this issue for LIME on document image classification, focusing on the segmentation step that defines the interpretable units being perturbed. Standard image-based LIME typically relies on natural-image superpixels, which are poorly aligned with document structure such as text regions, layout blocks, and identification codes. Using RVL-CDIP, we compare Quickshift and SLIC with document-aware segmentations based on OCR bounding boxes and regular grids. Our results show that segmentation strongly affects explanation consistency, correctness, and local fidelity. Document-aware segmentations produce more stable and faithful explanations, require fewer perturbations to converge, and expose shortcut behaviour based on document identification codes, a known RVL-CDIP bias that superpixel-based LIME often obscures. These findings show that reliable post-hoc explanation requires domain-aware interpretable representations, and that segmentation should be treated as part of the explanation method rather than as neutral preprocessing.

Deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance in echocardiographic video segmentation, with an increasing number of models incorporating temporal information. However, quantitative evaluation of temporal explainability remains largely unexplored. We propose a quantitative framework for evaluating Grad-CAM explanations using four complementary metrics measuring temporal consistency, saliency motion, anatomical overlap, and temporal overlap. Using EchoNet-Dynamic, we compare a baseline 2D U-Net with ConvLSTM U-Net models trained across multiple temporal strides. While segmentation performance remained comparable across all models, intermediate ConvLSTM explanations exhibited substantially lower saliency consistency and greater centroid motion than final prediction explanations. Temporal Bottleneck explanations were significantly more stable than Encoder Bottleneck explanations across all strides, while final ConvLSTM Decoder3 explanations were broadly comparable to those of the 2D U-Net. Importantly, conventional frame-wise explanation metrics cannot determine whether variation in intermediate explanations reflects meaningful temporal feature evolution or explanation instability. These findings establish a preliminary quantitative framework for temporal explainability and motivate temporal-aware XAI methods that explicitly account for evolving representations in medical video models.

This paper interrogates the political and philosophical stakes of AI through the lens of cyborg theory cosmotechnics and glitch feminism. It advocates for a tech-positive critically situated approach to AI as a collaborator and substrate for power relations rather than an autonomous agent of harm. By rejecting the naive pause stop narratives of the human AI binary and embracing an explainable AI XAI artistic practice within embodied intersectional and community rooted engagements AI can empower diverse voices and foster ethical creativity. It starts by examining a frontier cybersecurity AI situating its framing within AI public anxiety and arguing for a new critical stance on human navigation in an AI world.

Recent studies report that automated red-teaming finds more vulnerabilities, at lower cost, than human red-teaming on standard AI safety benchmarks, and some read this as evidence that human evaluators are becoming dispensable. The comparison measures one thing and the conclusion claims another. A benchmark measures how thoroughly an attacker searches a predefined set of harms, fixed in advance by the developers, and a harm left out of that set is invisible to any attacker working inside it, automated or not. The same blind spot appeared in academic cryptography and in clinical drug trials, where an evaluation that was internally valid stayed silent about the population it was never pointed at. We call the AI-safety version the \emph{threat-model coverage gap}, and find that it persists in a current open-weight model, where harms surface in non-English prompts that English benchmarks miss. Closing it requires evaluators whose deployment context differs from the developers'. The case for those evaluators is methodological, grounded in coverage, and the existing evaluation frame is unlikely to produce them on its own.

As people increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) for guidance in their own lives, scholars, lawyers, and even judges have begun to consider the role of AI in legal decision-making. As "silicon sampling" -- the use of generative AI models in social science research -- is now impacting academia, "silicon jurors" could make an appearance in courtrooms. This study joins an emerging line of research on generative AI models' ability to simulate human legal judgments. In particular, we study how large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots respond to series of questions about legal reasonableness. When the law needs to judge the appropriateness of a behavior, it most often asks whether the behavior was "reasonable." Yet despite the ubiquity of reasonableness judgments, they are the site of constant vexation for lawyers, judges, and lay people. Reasonableness seems inherently vague and unpredictable, since it relies on variable context and implicit conceptual schemas. Moreover, many scholars caution that reasonableness judgments may vary along demographic lines. We compare the answers of human participants to those of twenty-six LLMs across twenty-five different legally relevant reasonableness judgments. Overall, our findings suggest that chatbot responses generally track those of human participants. Nonetheless, we find some suggestive -- and potentially concerning -- results. Compared to humans, LLMs generate more homogeneous responses and occasionally treat a variable standard as an invariant rule. And, compared to humans, LLMs tend to generate answers that are more favorable to the government and to corporations. Finally, our results indicate that LLMs' responses tend to align more closely with those of respondents who are white, male, older, and more educated. More systematic research is needed to confirm or reject these initial findings.

AI Agents are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where they interact with external tools and make sequential decisions with limited human oversight. This creates a pressing need for reliable and auditable explanations of what an agent did and why. However, traditional Explainable AI (XAI) methods fall short of providing the process-level transparency required for such interactive, multi-step systems, motivating a paradigm shift toward approaches specifically designed for AI Agents. To address this gap, we present a post-hoc XAI framework that transforms a lengthy agent's execution trace into a structured report and a faithful natural-language explanation explicitly grounded in its observable behavior. Because it relies solely on execution traces, the framework applies across different agent architectures, environments, and tasks. Human and automated evaluations across multiple benchmarks and architectures show that our framework produces high-quality, trace-faithful explanations while reliably identifying unsupported claims, unjustified actions, and evidence gaps, outperforming naive LLM-generated explanations.

Post-deployment drift poses a critical risk to algorithmic accountability, particularly when ground truth labels are delayed and performance degradation becomes a "silent failure". While Explainable AI (XAI) is often relied upon to audit these shifts, we demonstrate that popular local attribution methods (e.g., TreeSHAP) can exhibit misleading stability even as model reliability collapses. In this paper, we propose a Framework for Model Monitoring and Observability (FMMO) designed to expose the divergence between local explanation stability and global distribution shifts. Using benchmark, synthetic, and real-world datasets, we show that local XAI methods fail to flag drift-induced disparate impact, specifically where False Positive Rates spike for protected groups while feature attributions remain unchanged. By integrating global surrogate models with model utilization measurements, FMMO mitigates this fairness blind spot, ensuring that stakeholders can detect discriminatory deterioration that standard local XAI tools overlook.

The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within real-world applications has raised a lot of concerns regarding their trustworthiness, especially in critical applications. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) has emerged with the objective of providing explanations to the users about the decisions made by AI systems. Several explanations for boolean classifiers have been introduced in the literature, including abductive and contrastive explanations, each giving a different insight on the decision of the classifier. However, computing an explanation for a decision of a boolean classifier is a hard problem in general. One way to deal with this complexity is to rely on a compiled representation of the classifier for which each explanation can be computed efficiently. Unfortunately, we prove in this paper that several classes of abductive explanations, remain hard to compute even for Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams, one of the most tractable subsets of the knowledge compilation map. Included in such classes are shorter abductive explanations or abductive explanations that include the explainee's preferences. To recover the benefits of working with compiled representations, we show that a proper representation of the dual-rail encoding of the classifier can be used to compute efficiently these classes of explanations.