Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is the attempt to make the finding of results of non-linearly programmed systems transparent to avoid so-called black-box processes. The main task of XAI is to make non-linear programmed systems transparent. It offers practical methods to explain AI models, which, for example, correspond to the regulation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The following five methods are listed, which have to make AI models more transparent and understandable. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) is a technique that brings such explainability and scales to potentially highly complex deep neural networks.

Tree-based machine learning models are among the most popular non-linear predictive learning models in use today, with applications in a variety of domains such as medicine, finance, advertising, supply chain management, and more. These models are often described as a "black box" -- while their predictions are based on user inputs, how the models arrived at their predictions using those inputs is shrouded in mystery. This is problematic for some use cases, such as medicine, where the patterns and individual variability a model might uncover among various factors can be as important as the prediction itself. Now, thanks to researchers in the Allen School's Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence for Medicine and Science (AIMS Lab) and UW Medicine, the path from inputs to predicted outcome has become a lot less dense. In a paper published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the team presents TreeExplainer, a novel set of tools rooted in game theory that enables exact computation of optimal local explanations for tree-based models.

The complexity of state-of-the-art modeling techniques for image classification impedes the ability to explain model predictions in an interpretable way. Existing explanation methods generally create importance rankings in terms of pixels or pixel groups. However, the resulting explanations lack an optimal size, do not consider feature dependence and are only related to one class. Counterfactual explanation methods are considered promising to explain complex model decisions, since they are associated with a high degree of human interpretability. In this paper, SEDC is introduced as a model-agnostic instance-level explanation method for image classification to obtain visual counterfactual explanations. For a given image, SEDC searches a small set of segments that, in case of removal, alters the classification. As image classification tasks are typically multiclass problems, SEDC-T is proposed as an alternative method that allows specifying a target counterfactual class. We compare SEDC(-T) with popular feature importance methods such as LRP, LIME and SHAP, and we describe how the mentioned importance ranking issues are addressed. Moreover, concrete examples and experiments illustrate the potential of our approach (1) to obtain trust and insight, and (2) to obtain input for model improvement by explaining misclassifications.

Prior work on generating explanations has been focused on providing the rationale behind the robot's decision making. While these approaches provide the right explanations from the explainer's perspective, they fail to heed the cognitive requirement of understanding an explanation from the explainee's perspective. In this work, we set out to address this issue from a planning context by considering the order of information provided in an explanation, which is referred to as the progressiveness of explanations. Progressive explanations contribute to a better understanding by minimizing the cumulative cognitive effort required for understanding all the information in an explanation. As a result, such explanations are easier to understand. Given the sequential nature of communicating information, a general formulation based on goal-based Markov Decision Processes for generating progressive explanation is presented. The reward function of this MDP is learned via inverse reinforcement learning based on explanations that are provided by human subjects. Our method is evaluated in an escape-room domain. The results show that our progressive explanation generation method reduces the cognitive load over two baselines.

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Automated negotiation can be an efficient method for resolving conflict and redistributing resources in a coalition setting. Automated negotiation has already seen increased usage in fields such as e-commerce and power distribution in smart girds, and recent advancements in opponent modelling have proven to deliver better outcomes. However, significant barriers to more widespread adoption remain, such as lack of predictable outcome over time and user trust. Additionally, there have been many recent advancements in the field of reasoning about uncertainty, which could help alleviate both those problems. As there is no recent survey on these two fields, and specifically not on their possible intersection we aim to provide such a survey here.

We attempt to give a unifying view of the various recent attempts to (i) improve the interpretability of tree-based models and (ii) debias the the default variable-importance measure in random Forests, Gini importance. In particular, we demonstrate a common thread among the out-of-bag based bias correction methods and their connection to local explanation for trees. In addition, we point out a bias caused by the inclusion of inbag data in the newly developed explainable AI for trees algorithms.

Z Advanced Computing, Inc. (ZAC), the pioneer startup on Explainable-AI (Artificial Intelligence) (XAI), is developing its Smart Home product line through a paid-pilot for Smart Appliances for BSH Home Appliances (a subsidiary of the Bosch Group, originally a joint venture between Bosch and Siemens), the largest manufacturer of home appliances in Europe and one of the largest in the world. ZAC just successfully finished its Phase 1 of the pilot program. "Our cognitive-based algorithm is more robust, resilient, consistent, and reproducible, with a higher accuracy, than Convolutional Neural Nets or GANs, which others are using now. It also requires much smaller number of training samples, compared to CNNs, which is a huge advantage," said Dr. Saied Tadayon, CTO of ZAC. "We did the entire work on a regular laptop, for both training and recognition, without any dedicated GPU. So, our computing requirement is much smaller than a typical Neural Net, which requires a dedicated GPU," continued Dr. Bijan Tadayon, CEO of ZAC.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) seems to be a hot topic nowadays. It is a topic I came across recently in a number of instances: workshops organized by the European Defense Agency (EDA), posts from technology partners such as Expert System (here) or internal discussion with SDL's Research team. The straightforward definition of XAI comes from Wikipedia: "Explainable AI (XAI) refers to methods and techniques in the application of artificial intelligence technology (AI) such that the results of the solution can be understood by human experts. It contrasts with the concept of the "black box" in machine learning where even their designers cannot explain why the AI arrived at a specific decision. XAI is an implementation of the social right to explanation."

The statistical branch of Artificial Intelligence has enamored organizations across industries, spurred an immense amount of capital dedicated to its technologies, and entranced numerous media outlets for the past couple of years. All of this attention, however, will ultimately prove unwarranted unless organizations, data scientists, and various vendors can answer one simple question: can they provide Explainable AI? Although the ability to explain the results of Machine Learning models--and produce consistent results from them--has never been easy, a number of emergent techniques have recently appeared to open the proverbial'black box' rendering these models so difficult to explain. One of the most useful involves modeling real-world events with the adaptive schema of knowledge graphs and, via Machine Learning, gleaning whether they're related and how frequently they take place together. When the knowledge graph environment becomes endowed with an additional temporal dimension that organizations can traverse forwards and backwards with dynamic visualizations, they can understand what actually triggered these events, how one affected others, and the critical aspect of causation necessary for Explainable AI.