Research Papers

In recent years, the field of explainable AI (XAI) has produced a vast collection of algorithms, providing a useful toolbox for researchers and practitioners to build XAI applications. With the rich application opportunities, explainability is believed to have moved beyond a demand by data scientists or researchers to comprehend the models they develop, to an essential requirement for people to trust and adopt AI deployed in numerous domains. However, explainability is an inherently human-centric property and the field is starting to embrace human-centered approaches. Human-computer interaction (HCI) research and user experience (UX) design in this area are becoming increasingly important. In this chapter, we begin with a high-level overview of the technical landscape of XAI algorithms, then selectively survey our own and other recent HCI works that take human-centered approaches to design, evaluate, and provide conceptual and methodological tools for XAI. We ask the question "what are human-centered approaches doing for XAI" and highlight three roles that they play in shaping XAI technologies by helping navigate, assess and expand the XAI toolbox: to drive technical choices by users' explainability needs, to uncover pitfalls of existing XAI methods and inform new methods, and to provide conceptual frameworks for human-compatible XAI.

A Comprehensive Taxonomy for Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Survey of Surveys on Methods and Concepts

Gesina Schwalbe, Bettina Finzel

In the meantime, a wide variety of terminologies, motivations, approaches, and evaluation criteria have been developed within the research field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). With the amount of XAI methods vastly growing, a taxonomy of methods is needed by researchers as well as practitioners: To grasp the breadth of the topic, compare methods, and to select the right XAI method based on traits required by a specific use-case context. Many taxonomies for XAI methods of varying level of detail and depth can be found in the literature. While they often have a different focus, they also exhibit many points of overlap. This paper unifies these efforts and provides a complete taxonomy of XAI methods with respect to notions present in the current state of research. In a structured literature analysis and meta-study, we identified and reviewed more than 50 of the most cited and current surveys on XAI methods, metrics, and method traits. After summarizing them in a survey of surveys, we merge terminologies and concepts of the articles into a unified structured taxonomy. Single concepts therein are illustrated by more than 50 diverse selected example methods in total, which we categorize accordingly. The taxonomy may serve both beginners, researchers, and practitioners as a reference and wide-ranging overview of XAI method traits and aspects. Hence, it provides foundations for targeted, use-case-oriented, and context-sensitive future research.

A large set of the explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) literature is emerging on feature relevance techniques to explain a deep neural network (DNN) output or explaining models that ingest image source data. However, assessing how XAI techniques can help understand models beyond classification tasks, e.g. for reinforcement learning (RL), has not been extensively studied. We review recent works in the direction to attain Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL), a relatively new subfield of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, intended to be used in general public applications, with diverse audiences, requiring ethical, responsible and trustable algorithms. In critical situations where it is essential to justify and explain the agent's behaviour, better explainability and interpretability of RL models could help gain scientific insight on the inner workings of what is still considered a black box. We evaluate mainly studies directly linking explainability to RL, and split these into two categories according to the way the explanations are generated: transparent algorithms and post-hoc explainaility. We also review the most prominent XAI works from the lenses of how they could potentially enlighten the further deployment of the latest advances in RL, in the demanding present and future of everyday problems.

WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale

Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula +1

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) (Levesque, Davis, and Morgenstern 2011), a benchmark for commonsense reasoning, is a set of 273 expert-crafted pronoun resolution problems originally designed to be unsolvable for statistical models that rely on selectional preferences or word associations. However, recent advances in neural language models have already reached around 90% accuracy on variants of WSC. This raises an important question whether these models have truly acquired robust commonsense capabilities or whether they rely on spurious biases in the datasets that lead to an overestimation of the true capabilities of machine commonsense. To investigate this question, we introduce WinoGrande, a large-scale dataset of 44k problems, inspired by the original WSC design, but adjusted to improve both the scale and the hardness of the dataset. The key steps of the dataset construction consist of (1) a carefully designed crowdsourcing procedure, followed by (2) systematic bias reduction using a novel AfLite algorithm that generalizes human-detectable word associations to machine-detectable embedding associations. The best state-of-the-art methods on WinoGrande achieve 59.4-79.1%, which are 15-35% below human performance of 94.0%, depending on the amount of the training data allowed. Furthermore, we establish new state-of-the-art results on five related benchmarks - WSC (90.1%), DPR (93.1%), COPA (90.6%), KnowRef (85.6%), and Winogender (97.1%). These results have dual implications: on one hand, they demonstrate the effectiveness of WinoGrande when used as a resource for transfer learning. On the other hand, they raise a concern that we are likely to be overestimating the true capabilities of machine commonsense across all these benchmarks. We emphasize the importance of algorithmic bias reduction in existing and future benchmarks to mitigate such overestimation.

AI Transparency in the Age of LLMs: A Human-Centered Research Roadmap

Q. Vera Liao, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) brings about tremendous opportunities for innovation but also looming risks for individuals and society at large. We have reached a pivotal moment for ensuring that LLMs and LLM-infused applications are developed and deployed responsibly. However, a central pillar of responsible AI -- transparency -- is largely missing from the current discourse around LLMs. It is paramount to pursue new approaches to provide transparency for LLMs, and years of research at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction (HCI) highlight that we must do so with a human-centered perspective: Transparency is fundamentally about supporting appropriate human understanding, and this understanding is sought by different stakeholders with different goals in different contexts. In this new era of LLMs, we must develop and design approaches to transparency by considering the needs of stakeholders in the emerging LLM ecosystem, the novel types of LLM-infused applications being built, and the new usage patterns and challenges around LLMs, all while building on lessons learned about how people process, interact with, and make use of information. We reflect on the unique challenges that arise in providing transparency for LLMs, along with lessons learned from HCI and responsible AI research that has taken a human-centered perspective on AI transparency. We then lay out four common approaches that the community has taken to achieve transparency -- model reporting, publishing evaluation results, providing explanations, and communicating uncertainty -- and call out open questions around how these approaches may or may not be applied to LLMs. We hope this provides a starting point for discussion and a useful roadmap for future research.

Shadow Alignment: The Ease of Subverting Safely-Aligned Language Models

Xianjun Yang, Xiao Wang, Qi Zhang +4

Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language, and reader discretion is recommended. The increasing open release of powerful large language models (LLMs) has facilitated the development of downstream applications by reducing the essential cost of data annotation and computation. To ensure AI safety, extensive safety-alignment measures have been conducted to armor these models against malicious use (primarily hard prompt attack). However, beneath the seemingly resilient facade of the armor, there might lurk a shadow. By simply tuning on 100 malicious examples with 1 GPU hour, these safely aligned LLMs can be easily subverted to generate harmful content. Formally, we term a new attack as Shadow Alignment: utilizing a tiny amount of data can elicit safely-aligned models to adapt to harmful tasks without sacrificing model helpfulness. Remarkably, the subverted models retain their capability to respond appropriately to regular inquiries. Experiments across 8 models released by 5 different organizations (LLaMa-2, Falcon, InternLM, BaiChuan2, Vicuna) demonstrate the effectiveness of shadow alignment attack. Besides, the single-turn English-only attack successfully transfers to multi-turn dialogue and other languages. This study serves as a clarion call for a collective effort to overhaul and fortify the safety of open-source LLMs against malicious attackers.

Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing

Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell +3

Although essential to revealing biased performance, well intentioned attempts at algorithmic auditing can have effects that may harm the very populations these measures are meant to protect. This concern is even more salient while auditing biometric systems such as facial recognition, where the data is sensitive and the technology is often used in ethically questionable manners. We demonstrate a set of five ethical concerns in the particular case of auditing commercial facial processing technology, highlighting additional design considerations and ethical tensions the auditor needs to be aware of so as not exacerbate or complement the harms propagated by the audited system. We go further to provide tangible illustrations of these concerns, and conclude by reflecting on what these concerns mean for the role of the algorithmic audit and the fundamental product limitations they reveal.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), i.e., the development of more transparent and interpretable AI models, has gained increased traction over the last few years. This is due to the fact that, in conjunction with their growth into powerful and ubiquitous tools, AI models exhibit one detrimential characteristic: a performance-transparency trade-off. This describes the fact that the more complex a model's inner workings, the less clear it is how its predictions or decisions were achieved. But, especially considering Machine Learning (ML) methods like Reinforcement Learning (RL) where the system learns autonomously, the necessity to understand the underlying reasoning for their decisions becomes apparent. Since, to the best of our knowledge, there exists no single work offering an overview of Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) methods, this survey attempts to address this gap. We give a short summary of the problem, a definition of important terms, and offer a classification and assessment of current XRL methods. We found that a) the majority of XRL methods function by mimicking and simplifying a complex model instead of designing an inherently simple one, and b) XRL (and XAI) methods often neglect to consider the human side of the equation, not taking into account research from related fields like psychology or philosophy. Thus, an interdisciplinary effort is needed to adapt the generated explanations to a (non-expert) human user in order to effectively progress in the field of XRL and XAI in general.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence: a Systematic Review

Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has experienced a significant growth over the last few years. This is due to the widespread application of machine learning, particularly deep learning, that has led to the development of highly accurate models but lack explainability and interpretability. A plethora of methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, developed and tested. This systematic review contributes to the body of knowledge by clustering these methods with a hierarchical classification system with four main clusters: review articles, theories and notions, methods and their evaluation. It also summarises the state-of-the-art in XAI and recommends future research directions.

This is an integrative review that address the question, "What makes for a good explanation?" with reference to AI systems. Pertinent literatures are vast. Thus, this review is necessarily selective. That said, most of the key concepts and issues are expressed in this Report. The Report encapsulates the history of computer science efforts to create systems that explain and instruct (intelligent tutoring systems and expert systems). The Report expresses the explainability issues and challenges in modern AI, and presents capsule views of the leading psychological theories of explanation. Certain articles stand out by virtue of their particular relevance to XAI, and their methods, results, and key points are highlighted. It is recommended that AI/XAI researchers be encouraged to include in their research reports fuller details on their empirical or experimental methods, in the fashion of experimental psychology research reports: details on Participants, Instructions, Procedures, Tasks, Dependent Variables (operational definitions of the measures and metrics), Independent Variables (conditions), and Control Conditions.

On the Robustness of ChatGPT: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspective

Jindong Wang, Xixu Hu, Wenxin Hou +10

ChatGPT is a recent chatbot service released by OpenAI and is receiving increasing attention over the past few months. While evaluations of various aspects of ChatGPT have been done, its robustness, i.e., the performance to unexpected inputs, is still unclear to the public. Robustness is of particular concern in responsible AI, especially for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we conduct a thorough evaluation of the robustness of ChatGPT from the adversarial and out-of-distribution (OOD) perspective. To do so, we employ the AdvGLUE and ANLI benchmarks to assess adversarial robustness and the Flipkart review and DDXPlus medical diagnosis datasets for OOD evaluation. We select several popular foundation models as baselines. Results show that ChatGPT shows consistent advantages on most adversarial and OOD classification and translation tasks. However, the absolute performance is far from perfection, which suggests that adversarial and OOD robustness remains a significant threat to foundation models. Moreover, ChatGPT shows astounding performance in understanding dialogue-related texts and we find that it tends to provide informal suggestions for medical tasks instead of definitive answers. Finally, we present in-depth discussions of possible research directions.

The utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, bringing forth numerous benefits and conveniences. However, this expansion has also provoked ethical concerns, such as privacy breaches, algorithmic discrimination, security and reliability issues, transparency, and other unintended consequences. To determine whether a global consensus exists regarding the ethical principles that should govern AI applications and to contribute to the formation of future regulations, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of 200 governance policies and ethical guidelines for AI usage published by public bodies, academic institutions, private companies, and civil society organizations worldwide. We identified at least 17 resonating principles prevalent in the policies and guidelines of our dataset, released as an open-source database and tool. We present the limitations of performing a global scale analysis study paired with a critical analysis of our findings, presenting areas of consensus that should be incorporated into future regulatory efforts. All components tied to this work can be found in https://nkluge-correa.github.io/worldwide_AI-ethics/