Research Papers

Lessons from Usable ML Deployments and Application to Wind Turbine Monitoring

Alexandra Zytek, Wei-En Wang, Sofia Koukoura +1

Through past experiences deploying what we call usable ML (one step beyond explainable ML, including both explanations and other augmenting information) to real-world domains, we have learned three key lessons. First, many organizations are beginning to hire people who we call ``bridges'' because they bridge the gap between ML developers and domain experts, and these people fill a valuable role in developing usable ML applications. Second, a configurable system that enables easily iterating on usable ML interfaces during collaborations with bridges is key. Finally, there is a need for continuous, in-deployment evaluations to quantify the real-world impact of usable ML. Throughout this paper, we apply these lessons to the task of wind turbine monitoring, an essential task in the renewable energy domain. Turbine engineers and data analysts must decide whether to perform costly in-person investigations on turbines to prevent potential cases of brakepad failure, and well-tuned usable ML interfaces can aid with this decision-making process. Through the applications of our lessons to this task, we hope to demonstrate the potential real-world impact of usable ML in the renewable energy domain.

We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing equilibrium, lower linking costs can raise welfare but also increase exposure to extreme content, while very low costs reduce welfare and heighten polarization by discouraging moderate contributors. Policies that incentivize content provision can generate large welfare gains by changing who produces information, whereas link subsidies or attention reallocation mainly affect exposure and have limited welfare impact. These insights help explain why exposure-based interventions on social media platforms often yield ambiguous effects on polarization.

In this work, we explore various topics that fall under the umbrella of Uncertainty in post-hoc Explainable AI (XAI) methods. We in particular focus on the class of additive feature attribution explanation methods. We first describe our specifications of uncertainty and compare various statistical and recent methods to quantify the same. Next, for a particular instance, we study the relationship between a feature's attribution and its uncertainty and observe little correlation. As a result, we propose a modification in the distribution from which perturbations are sampled in LIME-based algorithms such that the important features have minimal uncertainty without an increase in computational cost. Next, while studying how the uncertainty in explanations varies across the feature space of a classifier, we observe that a fraction of instances show near-zero uncertainty. We coin the term "stable instances" for such instances and diagnose factors that make an instance stable. Next, we study how an XAI algorithm's uncertainty varies with the size and complexity of the underlying model. We observe that the more complex the model, the more inherent uncertainty is exhibited by it. As a result, we propose a measure to quantify the relative complexity of a blackbox classifier. This could be incorporated, for example, in LIME-based algorithms' sampling densities, to help different explanation algorithms achieve tighter confidence levels. Together, the above measures would have a strong impact on making XAI models relatively trustworthy for the end-user as well as aiding scientific discovery.

Model Agnostic Explainable Selective Regression via Uncertainty Estimation

Andrea Pugnana, Carlos Mougan, Dan Saattrup Nielsen

With the wide adoption of machine learning techniques, requirements have evolved beyond sheer high performance, often requiring models to be trustworthy. A common approach to increase the trustworthiness of such systems is to allow them to refrain from predicting. Such a framework is known as selective prediction. While selective prediction for classification tasks has been widely analyzed, the problem of selective regression is understudied. This paper presents a novel approach to selective regression that utilizes model-agnostic non-parametric uncertainty estimation. Our proposed framework showcases superior performance compared to state-of-the-art selective regressors, as demonstrated through comprehensive benchmarking on 69 datasets. Finally, we use explainable AI techniques to gain an understanding of the drivers behind selective regression. We implement our selective regression method in the open-source Python package doubt and release the code used to reproduce our experiments.

Deontological ethics, specifically understood through Immanuel Kant, provides a moral framework that emphasizes the importance of duties and principles, rather than the consequences of action. Understanding that despite the prominence of deontology, it is currently an overlooked approach in fairness metrics, this paper explores the compatibility of a Kantian deontological framework in fairness metrics, part of the AI alignment field. We revisit Kant's critique of utilitarianism, which is the primary approach in AI fairness metrics and argue that fairness principles should align with the Kantian deontological framework. By integrating Kantian ethics into AI alignment, we not only bring in a widely-accepted prominent moral theory but also strive for a more morally grounded AI landscape that better balances outcomes and procedures in pursuit of fairness and justice.

In the field of explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), sequential counterfactual (SCF) examples are often used to alter the decision of a trained classifier by implementing a sequence of modifications to the input instance. Although certain test-time algorithms aim to optimize for each new instance individually, recently Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proposed that seek to learn policies for discovering SCFs, thereby enhancing scalability. As is typical in RL, the formulation of the RL problem, including the specification of state space, actions, and rewards, can often be ambiguous. In this work, we identify shortcomings in existing methods that can result in policies with undesired properties, such as a bias towards specific actions. We propose to use the output probabilities of the classifier to create a more informative reward, to mitigate this effect.

Artificially intelligent chatbot, such as ChatGPT, represents a recent and powerful advancement in the AI domain. Users prefer them for obtaining quick and precise answers, avoiding the usual hassle of clicking through multiple links in traditional searches. ChatGPT's conversational approach makes it comfortable and accessible for finding answers quickly and in an organized manner. However, it is important to note that these chatbots have limitations, especially in terms of providing accurate answers as well as ethical concerns. In this study, we explore various scenarios involving ChatGPT's ethical implications within academic contexts, its limitations, and the potential misuse by specific user groups. To address these challenges, we propose architectural solutions aimed at preventing inappropriate use and promoting responsible AI interactions.

Machine-learning (ML) shortcuts or spurious correlations are artifacts in datasets that lead to very good training and test performance but severely limit the model's generalization capability. Such shortcuts are insidious because they go unnoticed due to good in-domain test performance. In this paper, we explore the influence of different shortcuts and show that even simple shortcuts are difficult to detect by explainable AI methods. We then exploit this fact and design an approach to defend online databases against crawlers: providers such as dating platforms, clothing manufacturers, or used car dealers have to deal with a professionalized crawling industry that grabs and resells data points on a large scale. We show that a deterrent can be created by deliberately adding ML shortcuts. Such augmented datasets are then unusable for ML use cases, which deters crawlers and the unauthorized use of data from the internet. Using real-world data from three use cases, we show that the proposed approach renders such collected data unusable, while the shortcut is at the same time difficult to notice in human perception. Thus, our proposed approach can serve as a proactive protection against illegitimate data crawling.

In this work, we propose CODE, an extension of existing work from the field of explainable AI that identifies class-specific recurring patterns to build a robust Out-of-Distribution (OoD) detection method for visual classifiers. CODE does not require any classifier retraining and is OoD-agnostic, i.e., tuned directly to the training dataset. Crucially, pattern identification allows us to provide images from the In-Distribution (ID) dataset as reference data to provide additional context to the confidence scores. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark based on perturbations of the ID dataset that provides a known and quantifiable measure of the discrepancy between the ID and OoD datasets serving as a reference value for the comparison between OoD detection methods.

Data analysis that uses the output of topological data analysis as input for machine learning algorithms has been the subject of extensive research. This approach offers a means of capturing the global structure of data. Persistent homology (PH), a common methodology within the field of TDA, has found wide-ranging applications in machine learning. One of the key reasons for the success of the PH-ML pipeline lies in the deterministic nature of feature extraction conducted through PH. The ability to achieve satisfactory levels of accuracy with relatively simple downstream machine learning models, when processing these extracted features, underlines the pipeline's superior interpretability. However, it must be noted that this interpretation has encountered issues. Specifically, it fails to accurately reflect the feasible parameter region in the data generation process, and the physical or chemical constraints that restrict this process. Against this backdrop, we explore the potential application of explainable AI methodologies to this PH-ML pipeline. We apply this approach to the specific problem of predicting gas adsorption in metal-organic frameworks and demonstrate that it can yield suggestive results. The codes to reproduce our results are available at https://github.com/naofumihama/xai_ph_ml

Proceedings of The first international workshop on eXplainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts)

Nick Bryan-Kinns, Corey Ford, Alan Chamberlain +6

This first international workshop on explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts) brought together a community of researchers in HCI, Interaction Design, AI, explainable AI (XAI), and digital arts to explore the role of XAI for the Arts. Workshop held at the 15th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C 2023).

In this work, we instantiate a novel perturbation-based multi-class explanation framework, LIPEx (Locally Interpretable Probabilistic Explanation). We demonstrate that LIPEx not only locally replicates the probability distributions output by the widely used complex classification models but also provides insight into how every feature deemed to be important affects the prediction probability for each of the possible classes. We achieve this by defining the explanation as a matrix obtained via regression with respect to the Hellinger distance in the space of probability distributions. Ablation tests on text and image data, show that LIPEx-guided removal of important features from the data causes more change in predictions for the underlying model than similar tests based on other saliency-based or feature importance-based Explainable AI (XAI) methods. It is also shown that compared to LIME, LIPEx is more data efficient in terms of using a lesser number of perturbations of the data to obtain a reliable explanation. This data-efficiency is seen to manifest as LIPEx being able to compute its explanation matrix around 53% faster than all-class LIME, for classification experiments with text data.