Cybersecurity vendors consistently apply AI (Artificial Intelligence) to their solutions and many cybersecurity domains can benefit from AI technology. However, black-box AI techniques present some difficulties in comprehension and adoption by its operators, given that their decisions are not always humanly understandable (as is usually the case with deep neural networks, for example). Since it aims to make the operation of AI algorithms more interpretable for its users and developers, XAI (eXplainable Artificial Intelligence) can be used to address this issue. Through a systematic literature review, this work seeks to investigate the current research scenario on XAI applied to cybersecurity, aiming to discover which XAI techniques have been applied in cybersecurity, and which areas of cybersecurity have already benefited from this technology.

Argument mining automatically identifies and extracts the structure of inference and reasoning conveyed in natural language arguments. To the best of our knowledge, most of the state-of-the-art works in this field have focused on using tree-like structures and linguistic modeling. But, these approaches are not able to model more complex structures which are often found in online forums and real world argumentation structures. In this paper, a novel methodology for argument mining is proposed which employs attention-based embeddings for link prediction to model the causational hierarchies in typical argument structures prevalent in online discourse.

Collaborative systems, such as Online Social Networks and the Internet of Things, enable users to share privacy sensitive content. Content in these systems is often co-owned by multiple users with different privacy expectations, leading to possible multiuser privacy conflicts. In order to resolve these conflicts, various agreement mechanisms have been designed and agents that could participate in such mechanisms have been proposed. However, research shows that users hesitate to use software tools for managing their privacy. To remedy this, we argue that users should be supported by trustworthy agents that adhere to the following criteria: (i) concealment of privacy preferences, such that only necessary information is shared with others, (ii) equity of treatment, such that different kinds of users are supported equally, (iii) collaboration of users, such that a group of users can support each other in agreement and (iv) explainability of actions, such that users know why certain information about them was shared to reach a decision. Accordingly, this paper proposes PACCART, an open-source agent that satisfies these criteria. Our experiments over simulations and user study indicate that PACCART increases user trust significantly.

An extractive rationale explains a language model's (LM's) prediction on a given task instance by highlighting the text inputs that most influenced the prediction. Ideally, rationale extraction should be faithful (reflective of LM's actual behavior) and plausible (convincing to humans), without compromising the LM's (i.e., task model's) task performance. Although attribution algorithms and select-predict pipelines are commonly used in rationale extraction, they both rely on certain heuristics that hinder them from satisfying all three desiderata. In light of this, we propose UNIREX, a flexible learning framework that generalizes rationale extractor optimization as follows: (1) specify architecture for a learned rationale extractor; (2) select explainability objectives (i.e., faithfulness and plausibility criteria); and (3) jointly the train task model and rationale extractor on the task using the selected objectives. UNIREX enables replacing prior works' heuristic design choices with a generic learned rationale extractor in (1) and optimizing it for all three desiderata in (2)-(3). To facilitate comparison between methods with respect to multiple desiderata, we introduce the Normalized Relative Gain (NRG) metric. Across five text classification datasets, our best UNIREX configuration outperforms baselines by an average of 32.9% NRG. Plus, we find that UNIREX-trained rationale extractors can even generalize to unseen datasets and tasks.

The recent spike in certified Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for healthcare has renewed the debate around adoption of this technology. One thread of such debate concerns Explainable AI (XAI) and its promise to render AI devices more transparent and trustworthy. A few voices active in the medical AI space have expressed concerns on the reliability of Explainable AI techniques and especially feature attribution methods, questioning their use and inclusion in guidelines and standards. Despite valid concerns, we argue that existing criticism on the viability of post-hoc local explainability methods throws away the baby with the bathwater by generalizing a problem that is specific to image data. We begin by characterizing the problem as a lack of semantic match between explanations and human understanding. To understand when feature importance can be used reliably, we introduce a distinction between feature importance of low- and high-level features. We argue that for data types where low-level features come endowed with a clear semantics, such as tabular data like Electronic Health Records (EHRs), semantic match can be obtained, and thus feature attribution methods can still be employed in a meaningful and useful way. Finally, we sketch a procedure to test whether semantic match has been achieved.

Counterfactual explanations are a common tool to explain artificial intelligence models. For Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents, they answer "Why not?" or "What if?" questions by illustrating what minimal change to a state is needed such that an agent chooses a different action. Generating counterfactual explanations for RL agents with visual input is especially challenging because of their large state spaces and because their decisions are part of an overarching policy, which includes long-term decision-making. However, research focusing on counterfactual explanations, specifically for RL agents with visual input, is scarce and does not go beyond identifying defective agents. It is unclear whether counterfactual explanations are still helpful for more complex tasks like analyzing the learned strategies of different agents or choosing a fitting agent for a specific task. We propose a novel but simple method to generate counterfactual explanations for RL agents by formulating the problem as a domain transfer problem which allows the use of adversarial learning techniques like StarGAN. Our method is fully model-agnostic and we demonstrate that it outperforms the only previous method in several computational metrics. Furthermore, we show in a user study that our method performs best when analyzing which strategies different agents pursue.

In this paper, we describe VivesDebate-Speech, a corpus of spoken argumentation created to leverage audio features for argument mining tasks. The creation of this corpus represents an important contribution to the intersection of speech processing and argument mining communities, and one of the most complete publicly available resources in this topic. Moreover, we have performed a set of first-of-their-kind experiments which show an improvement when integrating audio features into the argument mining pipeline. The provided results can be used as a baseline for future research.

I searched for the following keywords in a SemanticScholar query and filter them using exact-match using papers' title abstract. This set of keywords is actually pretty conservative (initially I started with a bigger list), but even with this conservative set, 1-keyword-match filtering unfortunately resulted in many non-XAI papers being retrieved for various reasons -- so I only include papers match 2 unique keywords or more. A random sample of 100 papers yielded 99% precision with a manual check (one paper mentioned keywords in the abstract simply as motivation for adjacent research). The keyword-based search retrieved 3101 papers. Then searched for them by title using the SemanticScholar API with fuzzy matching.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems utilizing deep neural networks (DNNs) and machine learning (ML) algorithms are widely used for solving important problems in bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, and precision medicine. However, complex DNNs or ML models, which are often perceived as opaque and black-box, can make it difficult to understand the reasoning behind their decisions. This lack of transparency can be a challenge for both end-users and decision-makers, as well as AI developers. Additionally, in sensitive areas like healthcare, explainability and accountability are not only desirable but also legally required for AI systems that can have a significant impact on human lives. Fairness is another growing concern, as algorithmic decisions should not show bias or discrimination towards certain groups or individuals based on sensitive attributes. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to overcome the opaqueness of black-box models and provide transparency in how AI systems make decisions. Interpretable ML models can explain how they make predictions and the factors that influence their outcomes. However, most state-of-the-art interpretable ML methods are domain-agnostic and evolved from fields like computer vision, automated reasoning, or statistics, making direct application to bioinformatics problems challenging without customization and domain-specific adaptation. In this paper, we discuss the importance of explainability in the context of bioinformatics, provide an overview of model-specific and model-agnostic interpretable ML methods and tools, and outline their potential caveats and drawbacks. Besides, we discuss how to customize existing interpretable ML methods for bioinformatics problems. Nevertheless, we demonstrate how XAI methods can improve transparency through case studies in bioimaging, cancer genomics, and text mining.

Explainable artificial intelligence is increasingly used in machine learning (ML) based decision-making systems in healthcare. However, little research has compared the utility of different explanation methods in guiding healthcare experts for patient care. Moreover, it is unclear how useful, understandable, actionable and trustworthy these methods are for healthcare experts, as they often require technical ML knowledge. This paper presents an explanation dashboard that predicts the risk of diabetes onset and explains those predictions with data-centric, feature-importance, and example-based explanations. We designed an interactive dashboard to assist healthcare experts, such as nurses and physicians, in monitoring the risk of diabetes onset and recommending measures to minimize risk. We conducted a qualitative study with 11 healthcare experts and a mixed-methods study with 45 healthcare experts and 51 diabetic patients to compare the different explanation methods in our dashboard in terms of understandability, usefulness, actionability, and trust. Results indicate that our participants preferred our representation of data-centric explanations that provide local explanations with a global overview over other methods. Therefore, this paper highlights the importance of visually directive data-centric explanation method for assisting healthcare experts to gain actionable insights from patient health records. Furthermore, we share our design implications for tailoring the visual representation of different explanation methods for healthcare experts.