Explainable machine learning (ML) has gained traction in recent years due to the increasing adoption of ML-based systems in many sectors. Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) provide ``what if'' feedback of the form ``if an input datapoint were $x'$ instead of $x$, then an ML-based system's output would be $y'$ instead of $y$.'' CFEs are attractive due to their actionable feedback, amenability to existing legal frameworks, and fidelity to the underlying ML model. Yet, current CFE approaches are single shot -- that is, they assume $x$ can change to $x'$ in a single time period. We propose a novel stochastic-control-based approach that generates sequential CFEs, that is, CFEs that allow $x$ to move stochastically and sequentially across intermediate states to a final state $x'$. Our approach is model agnostic and black box. Furthermore, calculation of CFEs is amortized such that once trained, it applies to multiple datapoints without the need for re-optimization. In addition to these primary characteristics, our approach admits optional desiderata such as adherence to the data manifold, respect for causal relations, and sparsity -- identified by past research as desirable properties of CFEs. We evaluate our approach using three real-world datasets and show successful generation of sequential CFEs that respect other counterfactual desiderata.

Explainable AI (XAI) fully describes an AI model, its expected impact and any potential biases. It helps you understand the steps taken by an AI technique to arrive at a decision. In this article, we will take a look at XAI in detail and explore how you can implement it in your organisation. "About half (46%) of South African companies indicate that they are already implementing AI within their organisations." Why is explainable AI important for your business?

Providing meaningful and actionable explanations to end-users is a fundamental prerequisite for implementing explainable intelligent systems in the real world. Explainability is a situated interaction between a user and the AI system rather than being static design principles. The content of explanations is context-dependent and must be defined by evidence about the user and its context. This paper seeks to operationalize this concept by proposing a formative architecture that defines the explanation space from a user-inspired perspective. The architecture comprises five intertwined components to outline explanation requirements for a task: (1) the end-users mental models, (2) the end-users cognitive process, (3) the user interface, (4) the human-explainer agent, and the (5) agent process. We first define each component of the architecture. Then we present the Abstracted Explanation Space, a modeling tool that aggregates the architecture's components to support designers in systematically aligning explanations with the end-users work practices, needs, and goals. It guides the specifications of what needs to be explained (content - end-users mental model), why this explanation is necessary (context - end-users cognitive process), to delimit how to explain it (format - human-explainer agent and user interface), and when should the explanations be given. We then exemplify the tool's use in an ongoing case study in the aircraft maintenance domain. Finally, we discuss possible contributions of the tool, known limitations/areas for improvement, and future work to be done.

The main objective of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is to provide effective explanations for black-box classifiers. The existing literature lists many desirable properties for explanations to be useful, but there is no consensus on how to quantitatively evaluate explanations in practice. Moreover, explanations are typically used only to inspect black-box models, and the proactive use of explanations as a decision support is generally overlooked. Among the many approaches to XAI, a widely adopted paradigm is Local Linear Explanations - with LIME and SHAP emerging as state-of-the-art methods. We show that these methods are plagued by many defects including unstable explanations, divergence of actual implementations from the promised theoretical properties, and explanations for the wrong label. This highlights the need to have standard and unbiased evaluation procedures for Local Linear Explanations in the XAI field. In this paper we address the problem of identifying a clear and unambiguous set of metrics for the evaluation of Local Linear Explanations. This set includes both existing and novel metrics defined specifically for this class of explanations. All metrics have been included in an open Python framework, named LEAF. The purpose of LEAF is to provide a reference for end users to evaluate explanations in a standardised and unbiased way, and to guide researchers towards developing improved explainable techniques.

Explainable artificial intelligence is the attempt to elucidate the workings of systems too complex to be directly accessible to human cognition through suitable sideinformation referred to as "explanations". We present a trainable explanation module for convolutional image classifiers we call bounded logit attention (BLA). The BLA module learns to select a subset of the convolutional feature map for each input instance, which then serves as an explanation for the classifier's prediction. BLA overcomes several limitations of the instancewise feature selection method "learning to explain" (L2X) introduced by Chen et al. (2018): 1) BLA scales to real-world sized image classification problems, and 2) BLA offers a canonical way to learn explanations of variable size. Due to its modularity BLA lends itself to transfer learning setups and can also be employed as a post-hoc add-on to trained classifiers. Beyond explainability, BLA may serve as a general purpose method for differentiable approximation of subset selection. In a user study we find that BLA explanations are preferred over explanations generated by the popular (Grad-)CAM method (Zhou et al., 2016; Selvaraju et al., 2017).

The problem that we face now with artificial intelligence (AI) is that many methods work, and we believe that for whatever is done under the hoods – we don't elaborate on the details. Yet it's very important to understand how the prediction is done, not only to understand the architecture of the method. That's why explainable AI (xAI) is becoming a hot topic today. There are many goals for an xAI model to fulfill. It's important that domain experts using a model can trust it.

Model explainability becomes a basic part of the machine learning pipeline. Keeping a machine learning model as a "black box" is not an option anymore. Luckily there are tools that are evolving rapidly and becoming more popular. This guide is a practical guide for XAI analysis of SHAP open source Python package for a regression problem. SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) by Lundberg and Lee (2016) is a method to explain individual predictions, based on the game theoretically optimal Shapley values.

After the tremendous advances of deep learning and other AI methods, more attention is flowing into other properties of modern approaches, such as interpretability, fairness, etc. combined in frameworks like Responsible AI. Two research directions, namely Explainable AI and Uncertainty Quantification are becoming more and more important, but have been so far never combined and jointly explored. In this paper, I show how both research areas provide potential for combination, why more research should be done in this direction and how this would lead to an increase in trustability in AI systems.

Recent work on explainable clustering allows describing clusters when the features are interpretable. However, much modern machine learning focuses on complex data such as images, text, and graphs where deep learning is used but the raw features of data are not interpretable. This paper explores a novel setting for performing clustering on complex data while simultaneously generating explanations using interpretable tags. We propose deep descriptive clustering that performs sub-symbolic representation learning on complex data while generating explanations based on symbolic data. We form good clusters by maximizing the mutual information between empirical distribution on the inputs and the induced clustering labels for clustering objectives. We generate explanations by solving an integer linear programming that generates concise and orthogonal descriptions for each cluster. Finally, we allow the explanation to inform better clustering by proposing a novel pairwise loss with self-generated constraints to maximize the clustering and explanation module's consistency. Experimental results on public data demonstrate that our model outperforms competitive baselines in clustering performance while offering high-quality cluster-level explanations.

Explainable AI (XAI) has been investigated for decades and, together with AI itself, has witnessed unprecedented growth in recent years. Among various approaches to XAI, argumentative models have been advocated in both the AI and social science literature, as their dialectical nature appears to match some basic desirable features of the explanation activity. In this survey we overview XAI approaches built using methods from the field of computational argumentation, leveraging its wide array of reasoning abstractions and explanation delivery methods. We overview the literature focusing on different types of explanation (intrinsic and post-hoc), different models with which argumentation-based explanations are deployed, different forms of delivery, and different argumentation frameworks they use. We also lay out a roadmap for future work.