"My dog accidentally knocked down the trash and found old cheesy pasta in it, and is now convinced that trash cans provide an endless supply of cheesy pasta, knocking it over every chance she gets." Sometimes, you would have seen your Machine Learning(ML) model do the same too. A notorious example is how a neural network learned to differentiate between dogs and wolves. It didn't truly learn to differentiate between dogs and wolves, instead it learnt that all the wolf pictures had snow in the background as it was their natural habitat as opposed to dogs with grass in the background. The model then differentiated the two animals by looking at whether the background was snow or grass.

I will keep this section short but informative because as a Data Scientist we know very well why do we need to explain our models. Lets understand the need of XAI form below scenario.

Recently there has been an increasing interest in frameworks extending Dung's abstract Argumentation Framework (AF). Popular extensions include bipolar AFs and AFs with recursive attacks and necessary supports. Although the relationships between AF semantics and Partial Stable Models (PSMs) of logic programs has been deeply investigated, this is not the case for more general frameworks extending AF. In this paper we explore the relationships between AF-based frameworks and PSMs. We show that every AF-based framework $\Delta$ can be translated into a logic program $P_\Delta$ so that the extensions prescribed by different semantics of $\Delta$ coincide with subsets of the PSMs of $P_\Delta$. We provide a logic programming approach that characterizes, in an elegant and uniform way, the semantics of several AF-based frameworks. This result allows also to define the semantics for new AF-based frameworks, such as AFs with recursive attacks and recursive deductive supports. Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.

We propose a novel ranking-based semantics for Dung-style argumentation frameworks with the help of conditional logics. Using an intuitive translation for an argumentation framework to generate conditionals, we can apply nonmonotonic inference systems to generate a ranking on possible worlds. With this ranking we construct a ranking for our arguments. With a small extension to this ranking-based semantics we already satisfy some desirable properties for a ranking over arguments.

The scariest thing about Artificial Intelligence is that we never know who the teacher is! If you're working on a Tech Startup, AI and Machine Learning are likely parts of your roadmap (and if it's not, then it should be). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all around us. AI is there when you search for something on the Internet. AI helps us filter spam emails.

To understand the black-box characteristics of deep networks, counterfactual explanation that deduces not only the important features of an input space but also how those features should be modified to classify input as a target class has gained an increasing interest. The patterns that deep networks have learned from a training dataset can be grasped by observing the feature variation among various classes. However, current approaches perform the feature modification to increase the classification probability for the target class irrespective of the internal characteristics of deep networks. This often leads to unclear explanations that deviate from real-world data distributions. To address this problem, we propose a counterfactual explanation method that exploits the statistics learned from a training dataset. Especially, we gradually construct an explanation by iterating over masking and composition steps. The masking step aims to select an important feature from the input data to be classified as a target class. Meanwhile, the composition step aims to optimize the previously selected feature by ensuring that its output score is close to the logit space of the training data that are classified as the target class. Experimental results show that our method produces human-friendly interpretations on various classification datasets and verify that such interpretations can be achieved with fewer feature modification.

This post is about LSBoost, an Explainable'AI' algorithm which uses Gradient Boosted randomized networks for pattern recognition. In LSBoost, more specifically, the so called weak learners from LS_Boost are based on randomized neural networks' components and variants of Least Squares regression models. I've already presented some promising examples of use of LSBoost based on Ridge Regression weak learners. In mlsauce's version 0.7.1, the Lasso can also be used as an alternative ingredient to the weak learners. Here is a comparison of the regression coefficients obtained by using mlsauce's implementation of Ridge regression and the Lasso: The following example is about training set error vs testing set error, as a function of the regularization parameter, both for Ridge regression and Lasso-based weak learners.

End-users' trust in automated agents is important as automated decision-making and planning is increasingly used in many aspects of people's lives. In real-world applications of planning, multiple optimization objectives are often involved. Thus, planning agents' decisions can involve complex tradeoffs among competing objectives. It can be difficult for the end-users to understand why an agent decides on a particular planning solution on the basis of its objective values. As a result, the users may not know whether the agent is making the right decisions, and may lack trust in it. In this work, we contribute an approach, based on contrastive explanation, that enables a multi-objective MDP planning agent to explain its decisions in a way that communicates its tradeoff rationale in terms of the domain-level concepts. We conduct a human subjects experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of our explanation approach in a mobile robot navigation domain. The results show that our approach significantly improves the users' understanding, and confidence in their understanding, of the tradeoff rationale of the planning agent.

Human collaborators can effectively communicate with their partners to finish a common task by inferring each other's mental states (e.g., goals, beliefs, and desires). Such mind-aware communication minimizes the discrepancy among collaborators' mental states, and is crucial to the success in human ad-hoc teaming. We believe that robots collaborating with human users should demonstrate similar pedagogic behavior. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel explainable AI (XAI) framework for achieving human-like communication in human-robot collaborations, where the robot builds a hierarchical mind model of the human user and generates explanations of its own mind as a form of communications based on its online Bayesian inference of the user's mental state. To evaluate our framework, we conduct a user study on a real-time human-robot cooking task.

Combating fake news and misinformation propagation is a challenging task in the post-truth era. News feed and search algorithms could potentially lead to unintentional large-scale propagation of false and fabricated information with users being exposed to algorithmically selected false content. Our research investigates the effects of an Explainable AI assistant embedded in news review platforms for combating the propagation of fake news. We design a news reviewing and sharing interface, create a dataset of news stories, and train four interpretable fake news detection algorithms to study the effects of algorithmic transparency on end-users. We present evaluation results and analysis from multiple controlled crowdsourced studies. For a deeper understanding of Explainable AI systems, we discuss interactions between user engagement, mental model, trust, and performance measures in the process of explaining. The study results indicate that explanations helped participants to build appropriate mental models of the intelligent assistants in different conditions and adjust their trust accordingly for model limitations.