Research Papers

Bridging the Gap in XAI-Why Reliable Metrics Matter for Explainability and Compliance

Pratinav Seth, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu

Reliable explainability is not only a technical goal but also a cornerstone of private AI governance. As AI models enter high-stakes sectors, private actors such as auditors, insurers, certification bodies, and procurement agencies require standardized evaluation metrics to assess trustworthiness. However, current XAI evaluation metrics remain fragmented and prone to manipulation, which undermines accountability and compliance. We argue that standardized metrics can function as governance primitives, embedding auditability and accountability within AI systems for effective private oversight. Building upon prior work in XAI benchmarking, we identify key limitations in ensuring faithfulness, tamper resistance, and regulatory alignment. Furthermore, interpretability can directly support model alignment by providing a verifiable means of ensuring behavioral integrity in General Purpose AI (GPAI) systems. This connection between interpretability and alignment positions XAI metrics as both technical and regulatory instruments that help prevent alignment faking, a growing concern among oversight bodies. We propose a Governance by Metrics paradigm that treats explainability evaluation as a central mechanism of private AI governance. Our framework introduces a hierarchical model linking transparency, tamper resistance, scalability, and legal alignment, extending evaluation from model introspection toward systemic accountability. Through conceptual synthesis and alignment with governance standards, we outline a roadmap for integrating explainability metrics into continuous AI assurance pipelines that serve both private oversight and regulatory needs.

As reliance on AI systems for decision-making grows, it becomes critical to ensure that human users can appropriately balance trust in AI suggestions with their own judgment, especially in high-stakes domains like healthcare. However, human + AI teams have been shown to perform worse than AI alone, with evidence indicating automation bias as the reason for poorer performance, particularly because humans tend to follow AI's recommendations even when they are incorrect. In many existing human + AI systems, decision-making support is typically provided in the form of text explanations (XAI) to help users understand the AI's reasoning. Since human decision-making often relies on System 1 thinking, users may ignore or insufficiently engage with the explanations, leading to poor decision-making. Previous research suggests that there is a need for new approaches that encourage users to engage with the explanations and one proposed method is the use of cognitive forcing functions (CFFs). In this work, we examine how various decision-support mechanisms impact user engagement, trust, and human-AI collaborative task performance in a diabetes management decision-making scenario. In a controlled experiment with 108 participants, we evaluated the effects of six decision-support mechanisms split into two categories of explanations (text, visual) and four CFFs. Our findings reveal that mechanisms like AI confidence levels, text explanations, and performance visualizations enhanced human-AI collaborative task performance, and improved trust when AI reasoning clues were provided. Mechanisms like human feedback and AI-driven questions encouraged deeper reflection but often reduced task performance by increasing cognitive effort, which in turn affected trust. Simple mechanisms like visual explanations had little effect on trust, highlighting the importance of striking a balance in CFF and XAI design.

The rapid proliferation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems necessitates advanced, interpretable, and scalable intrusion detection systems (IDS) to combat emerging cyber threats. Traditional IDS face challenges such as high computational demands, limited explainability, and inflexibility against evolving attack patterns. To address these limitations, this study introduces the Lightweight Explainable Network Security framework (LENS-XAI), which combines robust intrusion detection with enhanced interpretability and scalability. LENS-XAI integrates knowledge distillation, variational autoencoder models, and attribution-based explainability techniques to achieve high detection accuracy and transparency in decision-making. By leveraging a training set comprising 10% of the available data, the framework optimizes computational efficiency without sacrificing performance. Experimental evaluation on four benchmark datasets: Edge-IIoTset, UKM-IDS20, CTU-13, and NSL-KDD, demonstrates the framework's superior performance, achieving detection accuracies of 95.34%, 99.92%, 98.42%, and 99.34%, respectively. Additionally, the framework excels in reducing false positives and adapting to complex attack scenarios, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Key strengths of LENS-XAI include its lightweight design, suitable for resource-constrained environments, and its scalability across diverse IIoT and cybersecurity contexts. Moreover, the explainability module enhances trust and transparency, critical for practical deployment in dynamic and sensitive applications. This research contributes significantly to advancing IDS by addressing computational efficiency, feature interpretability, and real-world applicability. Future work could focus on extending the framework to ensemble AI systems for distributed environments, further enhancing its robustness and adaptability.

Interpreting complex neural networks is crucial for understanding their decision-making processes, particularly in applications where transparency and accountability are essential. This proposed method addresses this need by focusing on layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), a technique used in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to attribute neural network outputs to input features through backpropagated relevance scores. Existing LRP methods often struggle with precision in evaluating individual neuron contributions. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel approach that improves the parsing of selected neurons during LRP backward propagation, using the Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG16) architecture as a case study. Our method creates neural network graphs to highlight critical paths and visualizes these paths with heatmaps, optimizing neuron selection through accuracy metrics like Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE). Additionally, we utilize a deconvolutional visualization technique to reconstruct feature maps, offering a comprehensive view of the network's inner workings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances interpretability and supports the development of more transparent artificial intelligence (AI) systems for computer vision applications. This advancement has the potential to improve the trustworthiness of AI models in real-world machine vision applications, thereby increasing their reliability and effectiveness.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become essential in modern healthcare, with large language models (LLMs) offering promising advances in clinical decision-making. Traditional model-based approaches, including those leveraging in-context demonstrations and those with specialized medical fine-tuning, have demonstrated strong performance in medical language processing but struggle with real-time adaptability, multi-step reasoning, and handling complex medical tasks. Agent-based AI systems address these limitations by incorporating reasoning traces, tool selection based on context, knowledge retrieval, and both short- and long-term memory. These additional features enable the medical AI agent to handle complex medical scenarios where decision-making should be built on real-time interaction with the environment. Therefore, unlike conventional model-based approaches that treat medical queries as isolated questions, medical AI agents approach them as complex tasks and behave more like human doctors. In this paper, we study the choice of the backbone LLM for medical AI agents, which is the foundation for the agent's overall reasoning and action generation. In particular, we consider the emergent o1 model and examine its impact on agents' reasoning, tool-use adaptability, and real-time information retrieval across diverse clinical scenarios, including high-stakes settings such as intensive care units (ICUs). Our findings demonstrate o1's ability to enhance diagnostic accuracy and consistency, paving the way for smarter, more responsive AI tools that support better patient outcomes and decision-making efficacy in clinical practice.

Human-Centric eXplainable AI in Education

Subhankar Maity, Aniket Deroy

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integrated into educational environments, how can we ensure that these systems are both understandable and trustworthy? The growing demand for explainability in AI systems is a critical area of focus. This paper explores Human-Centric eXplainable AI (HCXAI) in the educational landscape, emphasizing its role in enhancing learning outcomes, fostering trust among users, and ensuring transparency in AI-driven tools, particularly through the innovative use of large language models (LLMs). What challenges arise in the implementation of explainable AI in educational contexts? This paper analyzes these challenges, addressing the complexities of AI models and the diverse needs of users. It outlines comprehensive frameworks for developing HCXAI systems that prioritize user understanding and engagement, ensuring that educators and students can effectively interact with these technologies. Furthermore, what steps can educators, developers, and policymakers take to create more effective, inclusive, and ethically responsible AI solutions in education? The paper provides targeted recommendations to address this question, highlighting the necessity of prioritizing explainability. By doing so, how can we leverage AI's transformative potential to foster equitable and engaging educational experiences that support diverse learners?

Ethio-Fake: Cutting-Edge Approaches to Combat Fake News in Under-Resourced Languages Using Explainable AI

Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Melkamu Abay Mersha, Girma Yohannis Bade +3

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a significant threat to the integrity of information dissemination, particularly on social media platforms. Misinformation can spread quickly due to the ease of creating and disseminating content, affecting public opinion and sociopolitical events. Identifying false information is therefore essential to reducing its negative consequences and maintaining the reliability of online news sources. Traditional approaches to fake news detection often rely solely on content-based features, overlooking the crucial role of social context in shaping the perception and propagation of news articles. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach that integrates social context-based features with news content features to enhance the accuracy of fake news detection in under-resourced languages. We perform several experiments utilizing a variety of methodologies, including traditional machine learning, neural networks, ensemble learning, and transfer learning. Assessment of the outcomes of the experiments shows that the ensemble learning approach has the highest accuracy, achieving a 0.99 F1 score. Additionally, when compared with monolingual models, the fine-tuned model with the target language outperformed others, achieving a 0.94 F1 score. We analyze the functioning of the models, considering the important features that contribute to model performance, using explainable AI techniques.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays a crucial role in fostering transparency and trust in AI systems, where traditional XAI approaches typically offer one level of abstraction for explanations, often in the form of heatmaps highlighting single or multiple input features. However, we ask whether abstract reasoning or problem-solving strategies of a model may also be relevant, as these align more closely with how humans approach solutions to problems. We propose a framework, called Symbolic XAI, that attributes relevance to symbolic queries expressing logical relationships between input features, thereby capturing the abstract reasoning behind a model's predictions. The methodology is built upon a simple yet general multi-order decomposition of model predictions. This decomposition can be specified using higher-order propagation-based relevance methods, such as GNN-LRP, or perturbation-based explanation methods commonly used in XAI. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated in the domains of natural language processing (NLP), vision, and quantum chemistry (QC), where abstract symbolic domain knowledge is abundant and of significant interest to users. The Symbolic XAI framework provides an understanding of the model's decision-making process that is both flexible for customization by the user and human-readable through logical formulas.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has paved the way for revolutionary decision-making processes, which if harnessed appropriately, can contribute to advancements in various sectors, from healthcare to economics. However, its black box nature presents significant ethical challenges related to bias and transparency. AI applications are hugely impacted by biases, presenting inconsistent and unreliable findings, leading to significant costs and consequences, highlighting and perpetuating inequalities and unequal access to resources. Hence, developing safe, reliable, ethical, and Trustworthy AI systems is essential. Our team of researchers working with Trustworthy and Responsible AI, part of the Transdisciplinary Scholarship Initiative within the University of Calgary, conducts research on Trustworthy and Responsible AI, including fairness, bias mitigation, reproducibility, generalization, interpretability, and authenticity. In this paper, we review and discuss the intricacies of AI biases, definitions, methods of detection and mitigation, and metrics for evaluating bias. We also discuss open challenges with regard to the trustworthiness and widespread application of AI across diverse domains of human-centric decision making, as well as guidelines to foster Responsible and Trustworthy AI models.

Despite the massive attention given to time-series explanations due to their extensive applications, a notable limitation in existing approaches is their primary reliance on the time-domain. This overlooks the inherent characteristic of time-series data containing both time and frequency features. In this work, we present Spectral eXplanation (SpectralX), an XAI framework that provides time-frequency explanations for time-series black-box classifiers. This easily adaptable framework enables users to "plug-in" various perturbation-based XAI methods for any pre-trained time-series classification models to assess their impact on the explanation quality without having to modify the framework architecture. Additionally, we introduce Feature Importance Approximations (FIA), a new perturbation-based XAI method. These methods consist of feature insertion, deletion, and combination techniques to enhance computational efficiency and class-specific explanations in time-series classification tasks. We conduct extensive experiments in the generated synthetic dataset and various UCR Time-Series datasets to first compare the explanation performance of FIA and other existing perturbation-based XAI methods in both time-domain and time-frequency domain, and then show the superiority of our FIA in the time-frequency domain with the SpectralX framework. Finally, we conduct a user study to confirm the practicality of our FIA in SpectralX framework for class-specific time-frequency based time-series explanations. The source code is available in https://github.com/gustmd0121/Time_is_not_Enough

Systems, technologies, protocols, and infrastructures all face interoperability challenges. It is among the most crucial parameters to give real-world effectiveness. Organizations that achieve interoperability will be able to identify, prevent, and provide appropriate protection on an international scale, which can be relied upon. This paper aims to explain how future technologies such as 6G mobile communication, Internet of Everything (IoE), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Smart Contract embedded WPA3 protocol-based WiFi-8 can work together to prevent known attack vectors and provide protection against zero-day attacks, thus offering intelligent solutions for smart cities. The phrase zero-day refers to an attack that occurs on the day zero of the vulnerability's disclosure to the public or vendor. Existing systems require an extra layer of security. In the security world, interoperability enables disparate security solutions and systems to collaborate seamlessly. AI improves cybersecurity by enabling improved capabilities for detecting, responding, and preventing zero-day attacks. When interoperability and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) are integrated into cybersecurity, they form a strong protection against zero-day assaults. Additionally, we evaluate a couple of parameters based on the accuracy and time required for efficiently analyzing attack patterns and anomalies.

Explaining the decisions made by audio spoofing detection models is crucial for fostering trust in detection outcomes. However, current research on the interpretability of detection models is limited to applying XAI tools to post-trained models. In this paper, we utilize the wav2vec 2.0 model and attentive utterance-level features to integrate interpretability directly into the model's architecture, thereby enhancing transparency of the decision-making process. Specifically, we propose a class activation representation to localize the discriminative frames contributing to detection. Furthermore, we demonstrate that multi-label training based on spoofing types, rather than binary labels as bonafide and spoofed, enables the model to learn distinct characteristics of different attacks, significantly improving detection performance. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results, with an EER of 0.51% and a min t-DCF of 0.0165 on the ASVspoof2019-LA set.