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 Explanation & Argumentation


Explainable AI for Natural Adversarial Images

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Adversarial images highlight how vulnerable modern image classifiers are to perturbations outside of their training set. Human oversight might mitigate this weakness, but depends on humans understanding the AI well enough to predict when it is likely to make a mistake. In previous work we have found that humans tend to assume that the AI's decision process mirrors their own. Here we evaluate if methods from explainable AI can disrupt this assumption to help participants predict AI classifications for adversarial and standard images. We find that both saliency maps and examples facilitate catching AI errors, but their effects are not additive, and saliency maps are more effective than examples.


Developing a Fidelity Evaluation Approach for Interpretable Machine Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Explainable AI (XAI) methods are used in order to improve the interpretability of these complex "black box" models, thereby increasing transparency and enabling informed decision-making (Guidotti et al, 2018). Despite this, methods to assess the quality of explanations generated by such explainable methods are so far under-explored. In particular, functionallygrounded evaluation methods, which measure the inherent ability of explainable methods in a given situation, are often specific to a particular type of dataset or explainable method. A key measure of functionally-grounded explanation fitness is explanation fidelity, which assesses the correctness and completeness of the explanation with respect to the underlying black box predictive model (Zhou et al, 2021). Evaluations of fidelity in literature can generally be classified as one of the following: external fidelity evaluation, which assesses how well the prediction of the underlying model and the explanation agree, and internal fidelity, which assesses how well the explanation matches the decision-making processes of the underlying model (Messalas et al, 2019). While methods to evaluate external fidelity are relatively common in literature (Guidotti et al, 2019; Lakkaraju et al, 2016; Ming et al, 2019; Shankaranarayana and Runje, 2019), evaluation methods to evaluate internal fidelity using black box models are generally limited to text and image data, rather than tabular (Du et al, 2019; Fong and Vedaldi, 2017; Nguyen, 2018; Samek et al, 2017). In this paper, weproposeanovelevaluation method based onathree phase approach:(1) the creation of a fully transparent, inherently interpretable white box model, and evaluation of explanations against this model; (2) the usage of the white box as a proxy to refine and improve the evaluation of explanations generated by a black box model; and (3) test the fidelity of explanations for a black box model using the refined method from the second phase. The main contributions of this work are as follows: 1.


Generating Contrastive Explanations for Inductive Logic Programming Based on a Near Miss Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent research, human-understandable explanations of machine learning models have received a lot of attention. Often explanations are given in form of model simplifications or visualizations. However, as shown in cognitive science as well as in early AI research, concept understanding can also be improved by the alignment of a given instance for a concept with a similar counterexample. Contrasting a given instance with a structurally similar example which does not belong to the concept highlights what characteristics are necessary for concept membership. Such near misses have been proposed by Winston (1970) as efficient guidance for learning in relational domains. We introduce an explanation generation algorithm for relational concepts learned with Inductive Logic Programming (\textsc{GeNME}). The algorithm identifies near miss examples from a given set of instances and ranks these examples by their degree of closeness to a specific positive instance. A modified rule which covers the near miss but not the original instance is given as an explanation. We illustrate \textsc{GeNME} with the well known family domain consisting of kinship relations, the visual relational Winston arches domain and a real-world domain dealing with file management. We also present a psychological experiment comparing human preferences of rule-based, example-based, and near miss explanations in the family and the arches domains.


Can Explainable AI Explain Unfairness? A Framework for Evaluating Explainable AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many ML models are opaque to humans, producing decisions too complex for humans to easily understand. In response, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) tools that analyze the inner workings of a model have been created. Despite these tools' strength in translating model behavior, critiques have raised concerns about the impact of XAI tools as a tool for `fairwashing` by misleading users into trusting biased or incorrect models. In this paper, we created a framework for evaluating explainable AI tools with respect to their capabilities for detecting and addressing issues of bias and fairness as well as their capacity to communicate these results to their users clearly. We found that despite their capabilities in simplifying and explaining model behavior, many prominent XAI tools lack features that could be critical in detecting bias. Developers can use our framework to suggest modifications needed in their toolkits to reduce issues likes fairwashing.


Counterfactual Explanations as Interventions in Latent Space

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a set of techniques that allows the understanding of both technical and non-technical aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. XAI is crucial to help satisfying the increasingly important demand of \emph{trustworthy} Artificial Intelligence, characterized by fundamental characteristics such as respect of human autonomy, prevention of harm, transparency, accountability, etc. Within XAI techniques, counterfactual explanations aim to provide to end users a set of features (and their corresponding values) that need to be changed in order to achieve a desired outcome. Current approaches rarely take into account the feasibility of actions needed to achieve the proposed explanations, and in particular they fall short of considering the causal impact of such actions. In this paper, we present Counterfactual Explanations as Interventions in Latent Space (CEILS), a methodology to generate counterfactual explanations capturing by design the underlying causal relations from the data, and at the same time to provide feasible recommendations to reach the proposed profile. Moreover, our methodology has the advantage that it can be set on top of existing counterfactuals generator algorithms, thus minimising the complexity of imposing additional causal constrains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a set of different experiments using synthetic and real datasets (including a proprietary dataset of the financial domain).


Certification of embedded systems based on Machine Learning: A survey

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Nevertheless, the recent advances in machine learning triggered genuine interest, as machine learning offer promising preliminary results and open the way to a wide range of new functions for avionics systems, for instance in the area of autonomous flying. In this paper we investigate on how existing certification and regulation techniques, can (or cannot) handle software development that includes parts obtained by machine learning. Nowadays a large aircraft cockpit offers many avionic complex functions: flight controls, navigation, surveillance, communications, displays... Their design has required a top down iterative approach from aircraft level downward, thus the functions are performed by systems of systems, with each system decomposed into subsystems that may contain a collection of software and hardware items. Therefore, any avionic development considers 3 levels of engineering: (i) Function, (ii) System/Subsystem and (iii) Item. The development process of each engineering level relies on several decades of experience and good practices that keep on being adapted today.


Exploring deterministic frequency deviations with explainable AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deterministic frequency deviations (DFDs) critically affect power grid frequency quality and power system stability. A better understanding of these events is urgently needed as frequency deviations have been growing in the European grid in recent years. DFDs are partially explained by the rapid adjustment of power generation following the intervals of electricity trading, but this intuitive picture fails especially before and around noonday. In this article, we provide a detailed analysis of DFDs and their relation to external features using methods from explainable Artificial Intelligence. We establish a machine learning model that well describes the daily cycle of DFDs and elucidate key interdependencies using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Thereby, we identify solar ramps as critical to explain patterns in the Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF).


Pitfalls of Explainable ML: An Industry Perspective

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As machine learning (ML) systems take a more prominent and central role in contributing to life-impacting decisions, ensuring their trustworthiness and accountability is of utmost importance. Explanations sit at the core of these desirable attributes of a ML system. The emerging field is frequently called ``Explainable AI (XAI)'' or ``Explainable ML.'' The goal of explainable ML is to intuitively explain the predictions of a ML system, while adhering to the needs to various stakeholders. Many explanation techniques were developed with contributions from both academia and industry. However, there are several existing challenges that have not garnered enough interest and serve as roadblocks to widespread adoption of explainable ML. In this short paper, we enumerate challenges in explainable ML from an industry perspective. We hope these challenges will serve as promising future research directions, and would contribute to democratizing explainable ML.


Counterfactual Explanations for Machine Learning: Challenges Revisited

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) are an emerging technique under the umbrella of interpretability of machine learning (ML) models. They provide ``what if'' feedback of the form ``if an input datapoint were $x'$ instead of $x$, then an ML model's output would be $y'$ instead of $y$.'' Counterfactual explainability for ML models has yet to see widespread adoption in industry. In this short paper, we posit reasons for this slow uptake. Leveraging recent work outlining desirable properties of CFEs and our experience running the ML wing of a model monitoring startup, we identify outstanding obstacles hindering CFE deployment in industry.


Explainable AI for medical imaging: Explaining pneumothorax diagnoses with Bayesian Teaching

#artificialintelligence

Limited expert time is a key bottleneck in medical imaging. Due to advances in image classification, AI can now serve as decision-support for medical experts, with the potential for great gains in radiologist productivity and, by extension, public health. However, these gains are contingent on building and maintaining experts' trust in the AI agents. Explainable AI may build such trust by helping medical experts to understand the AI decision processes behind diagnostic judgements. Here we introduce and evaluate explanations based on Bayesian Teaching, a formal account of explanation rooted in the cognitive science of human learning. We find that medical experts exposed to explanations generated by Bayesian Teaching successfully predict the AI's diagnostic decisions and are more likely to certify the AI for cases when the AI is correct than when it is wrong, indicating appropriate trust. These results show that Explainable AI can be used to support human-AI collaboration in medical imaging.