This paper is preoccupied with the following question: given a (possibly opaque) learning system, how can we understand whether its behaviour adheres to governance constraints? The answer can be quite simple: we just need to "ask" the system about it. We propose to construct an investigator agent to query a learning agent -- the suspect agent -- to investigate its adherence to a given ethical policy in the context of an information-seeking dialogue, modeled in formal argumentation settings. This formal dialogue framework is the main contribution of this paper. Through it, we break down compliance checking mechanisms into three modular components, each of which can be tailored to various needs in a vast amount of ways: an investigator agent, a suspect agent, and an acceptance protocol determining whether the responses of the suspect agent comply with the policy. This acceptance protocol presents a fundamentally different approach to aggregation: rather than using quantitative methods to deal with the non-determinism of a learning system, we leverage the use of argumentation semantics to investigate the notion of properties holding consistently. Overall, we argue that the introduced formal dialogue framework opens many avenues both in the area of compliance checking and in the analysis of properties of opaque systems.

The objective of an online Mart is to match buyers and sellers, to weigh animals and to oversee their sale. A reliable pricing method can be developed by ML models that can read through historical sales data. However, when AI models suggest or recommend a price, that in itself does not reveal too much (i.e., it acts like a black box) about the qualities and the abilities of an animal. An interested buyer would like to know more about the salient features of an animal before making the right choice based on his requirements. A model capable of explaining the different factors that impact the price point is essential for the needs of the market. It can also inspire confidence in buyers and sellers about the price point offered. To achieve these objectives, we have been working with the team at MartEye, a startup based in Portershed in Galway City, Ireland. Through this paper, we report our work-in-progress research towards building a smart video analytic platform, leveraging Explainable AI techniques. Keywords: Explainable AI · Video Analytics · Internet of Things · vision based feature extraction · ML based price prediction.

State-of-the-art deep-learning systems use decision rules that are challenging for humans to model. Explainable AI (XAI) attempts to improve human understanding but rarely accounts for how people typically reason about unfamiliar agents. We propose explicitly modeling the human explainee via Bayesian Teaching, which evaluates explanations by how much they shift explainees' inferences toward a desired goal. We assess Bayesian Teaching in a binary image classification task across a variety of contexts. Absent intervention, participants predict that the AI's classifications will match their own, but explanations generated by Bayesian Teaching improve their ability to predict the AI's judgements by moving them away from this prior belief. Bayesian Teaching further allows each case to be broken down into sub-examples (here saliency maps). These sub-examples complement whole examples by improving error detection for familiar categories, whereas whole examples help predict correct AI judgements of unfamiliar cases.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown increasing promise in real-world applications, which has caused an increased interest in understanding their predictions. However, existing methods for explaining predictions from GNNs do not provide an opportunity for recourse: given a prediction for a particular instance, we want to understand how the prediction can be changed. We propose CF-GNNExplainer: the first method for generating counterfactual explanations for GNNs, i.e., the minimal perturbations to the input graph data such that the prediction changes. Using only edge deletions, we find that we are able to generate counterfactual examples for the majority of instances across three widely used datasets for GNN explanations, while removing less than 3 edges on average, with at least 94% accuracy. This indicates that CF-GNNExplainer primarily removes edges that are crucial for the original predictions, resulting in minimal counterfactual examples.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is an emerging research topic of machine learning aimed at unboxing how AI systems' black-box choices are made. This research field inspects the measures and models involved in decision-making and seeks solutions to explain them explicitly. Many of the machine learning algorithms can not manifest how and why a decision has been cast. This is particularly true of the most popular deep neural network approaches currently in use. Consequently, our confidence in AI systems can be hindered by the lack of explainability in these black-box models. The XAI becomes more and more crucial for deep learning powered applications, especially for medical and healthcare studies, although in general these deep neural networks can return an arresting dividend in performance. The insufficient explainability and transparency in most existing AI systems can be one of the major reasons that successful implementation and integration of AI tools into routine clinical practice are uncommon. In this study, we first surveyed the current progress of XAI and in particular its advances in healthcare applications. We then introduced our solutions for XAI leveraging multi-modal and multi-centre data fusion, and subsequently validated in two showcases following real clinical scenarios. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analyses can prove the efficacy of our proposed XAI solutions, from which we can envisage successful applications in a broader range of clinical questions.

This paper investigates the prospects of using directive explanations to assist people in achieving recourse of machine learning decisions. Directive explanations list which specific actions an individual needs to take to achieve their desired outcome. If a machine learning model makes a decision that is detrimental to an individual (e.g. denying a loan application), then it needs to both explain why it made that decision and also explain how the individual could obtain their desired outcome (if possible). At present, this is often done using counterfactual explanations, but such explanations generally do not tell individuals how to act. We assert that counterfactual explanations can be improved by explicitly providing people with actions they could use to achieve their desired goal. This paper makes two contributions. First, we present the results of an online study investigating people's perception of directive explanations. Second, we propose a conceptual model to generate such explanations. Our online study showed a significant preference for directive explanations ($p<0.001$). However, the participants' preferred explanation type was affected by multiple factors, such as individual preferences, social factors, and the feasibility of the directives. Our findings highlight the need for a human-centred and context-specific approach for creating directive explanations.

Rapid non-verbal communication of task-based stimuli is a challenge in human-machine teaming, particularly in closed-loop interactions such as driving. To achieve this, we must understand the representations of information for both the human and machine, and determine a basis for bridging these representations. Techniques of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) such as layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) provide visual heatmap explanations for high-dimensional machine learning techniques such as deep neural networks. On the side of human cognition, visual attention is driven by the bottom-up and top-down processing of sensory input related to the current task. Since both XAI and human cognition should focus on task-related stimuli, there may be overlaps between their representations of visual attention, potentially providing a means of nonverbal communication between the human and machine. In this work, we examine the correlations between LRP heatmap explanations of a neural network trained to predict driving behavior and eye gaze heatmaps of human drivers. The analysis is used to determine the feasibility of using such a technique for enhancing driving performance. We find that LRP heatmaps show increasing levels of similarity with eye gaze according to the task specificity of the neural network. We then propose how these findings may assist humans by visually directing attention towards relevant areas. To our knowledge, our work provides the first known analysis of LRP and eye gaze for driving tasks.

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. Two key dimensions for determining whether an argument is good in a particular dialogue are the degree to which the intended audience believes the argument and counterarguments, and the impact that the argument has on the concerns of the intended audience. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling persuadees in terms of their beliefs and concerns, and for harnessing these models in optimizing the choice of move in persuasion dialogues. Our approach is based on the Monte Carlo Tree Search which allows optimization in real-time. We provide empirical results of a study with human participants showing that our automated persuasion system based on this technology is superior to a baseline system that does not take the beliefs and concerns into account in its strategy.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has in recent years become a well-suited framework to generate human understandable explanations of black box models. In this paper, we present a novel XAI visual explanation algorithm denoted SIDU that can effectively localize entire object regions responsible for prediction in a full extend. We analyze its robustness and effectiveness through various computational and human subject experiments. In particular, we assess the SIDU algorithm using three different types of evaluations (Application, Human and Functionally-Grounded) to demonstrate its superior performance. The robustness of SIDU is further studied in presence of adversarial attack on black box models to better understand its performance.

When engaging in argumentative discourse, skilled human debaters tailor claims to the beliefs of the audience, to construct effective arguments. Recently, the field of computational argumentation witnessed extensive effort to address the automatic generation of arguments. However, existing approaches do not perform any audience-specific adaptation. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by studying the task of belief-based claim generation: Given a controversial topic and a set of beliefs, generate an argumentative claim tailored to the beliefs. To tackle this task, we model the people's prior beliefs through their stances on controversial topics and extend state-of-the-art text generation models to generate claims conditioned on the beliefs. Our automatic evaluation confirms the ability of our approach to adapt claims to a set of given beliefs. In a manual study, we additionally evaluate the generated claims in terms of informativeness and their likelihood to be uttered by someone with a respective belief. Our results reveal the limitations of modeling users' beliefs based on their stances, but demonstrate the potential of encoding beliefs into argumentative texts, laying the ground for future exploration of audience reach.