Explanation & Argumentation
Interestingness Elements for Explainable Reinforcement Learning: Understanding Agents' Capabilities and Limitations
Sequeira, Pedro, Gervasio, Melinda
We propose an explainable reinforcement learning (XRL) framework that analyzes an agent's history of interaction with the environment to extract interestingness elements that help explain its behavior. The framework relies on data readily available from standard RL algorithms, augmented with data that can easily be collected by the agent while learning. We describe how to create visual explanations of an agent's behavior in the form of short video-clips highlighting key interaction moments, based on the proposed elements. We also report on a user study where we evaluated the ability of humans in correctly perceiving the aptitude of agents with different characteristics, including their capabilities and limitations, given explanations automatically generated by our framework. The results show that the diversity of aspects captured by the different interestingness elements is crucial to help humans correctly identify the agents' aptitude in the task, and determine when they might need adjustments to improve their performance.
On the Understanding and Interpretation of Machine Learning Predictions in Clinical Gait Analysis Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence
Horst, Fabian, Slijepcevic, Djordje, Lapuschkin, Sebastian, Raberger, Anna-Maria, Zeppelzauer, Matthias, Samek, Wojciech, Breiteneder, Christian, Schรถllhorn, Wolfgang I., Horsak, Brian
Systems incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly used to guide decision-making in the healthcare sector. While AI-based systems provide powerful and promising results with regard to their classification and prediction accuracy (e.g., in differentiating between different disorders in human gait), most share a central limitation, namely their black-box character. Understanding which features classification models learn, whether they are meaningful and consequently whether their decisions are trustworthy is difficult and often impossible to comprehend. This severely hampers their applicability as decision-support systems in clinical practice. There is a strong need for AI-based systems to provide transparency and justification of predictions, which are necessary also for ethical and legal compliance. As a consequence, in recent years the field of explainable AI (XAI) has gained increasing importance. The primary aim of this article is to investigate whether XAI methods can enhance transparency, explainability and interpretability of predictions in automated clinical gait classification. We utilize a dataset comprising bilateral three-dimensional ground reaction force measurements from 132 patients with different lower-body gait disorders and 62 healthy controls. In our experiments, we included several gait classification tasks, employed a representative set of classification methods, and a well-established XAI method - Layer-wise Relevance Propagation - to explain decisions at the signal (input) level. The presented approach exemplifies how XAI can be used to understand and interpret state-of-the-art ML models trained for gait classification tasks, and shows that the features that are considered relevant for machine learning models can be attributed to meaningful and clinically relevant biomechanical gait characteristics.
This is how people like machines to explain themselves -- Sonder Scheme
Core to human-centered AI is explainability. If a machine cannot explain its reasoning in a way that humans understand and on human terms, the AI isn't working for people. Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Cornell University and the University of Kentucky recently published the results of teaching a machine to generate conversational explanations of its model's internal state and action data representations in real-time. They tested whether people like the machine to tell them how it made decisions, and what characteristics of explanations drove people's perceptions of explainability. Relatability is key to understandability โ when an AI uses natural language to explain itself, people put themselves in the AI's shoes and evaluate understandability based on whether the AI gives the same reasons they would.
Improved explanatory efficacy on human affect and workload through interactive process in artificial intelligence
Kim, Byung Hyung, Koh, Seunghun, Huh, Sejoon, Jo, Sungho
Despite recent advances in the field of explainable artificial intelligence systems, a concrete quantitative measure for evaluating the usability of such systems is nonexistent. Ensuring the success of an explanatory interface in interacting with users requires a cyclic, symbiotic relationship between human and artificial intelligence. We, therefore, propose explanatory efficacy, a novel metric for evaluating the strength of the cyclic relationship the interface exhibits. Furthermore, in a user study, we evaluated the perceived affect and workload and recorded the EEG signals of our participants as they interacted with our custom-built, iterative explanatory interface to build personalized recommendation systems. We found that systems for perceptually driven iterative tasks with greater explanatory efficacy are characterized by statistically significant hemispheric differences in neural signals, indicating the feasibility of neural correlates as a measure of explanatory efficacy. These findings are beneficial for researchers who aim to study the circular ecosystem of the human-artificial intelligence partnership. Keywords: Affect; Brain Lateralization; EEG; Explanatory Efficacy; Human-centric Explainable Artificial Intelligence; Interactive Explanation; Workload 1. Introduction Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms have resulted in models that not only achieve high predictive performance but also provide explanatory features to support their decisions, increasing model interpretability and transparency in real-world environments [1]. However, merely providing explanations is insufficient. Ultimately, AI should address the problems hindering human-agent interaction. Much of the current work for human-interpretable machine learning systems suffers from a lack of usability and efficacy [2]. Developing such a feedback-based interface for AI systems requires an evaluation on the strength of the cyclic relationship the interface exhibits, which we define as explanatory efficacy . Failing to integrate user knowledge with machine systems can decrease interaction quality to the point of causing interaction breakdowns. Consequently, the systems will lose their ability to justify their recommendations, decisions, or actions, resulting in a loss of trust from their users.
Abstract Argumentation and the Rational Man
Kampik, Timotheus, Nieves, Juan Carlos
Department of Computing Science, Ume a University 90187 Ume a, Sweden Abstract Abstract argumentation has emerged as a method for nonmonotonic reasoning that has gained tremendous traction in the symbolic artificial intelligence community. In the literature, the different approaches to abstract argumentation that were refined over the years are typically evaluated from a logics perspective; an analysis that is based on models of ideal, rational decision-making does not exist. In this paper, we close this gap by analyzing abstract argumentation from the perspective of the rational man paradigm in microeconomic theory. To assess under which conditions abstract argumentation-based choice functions can be considered economically rational, we define a new argumentation principle that ensures compliance with the rational man's reference independence property, which stipulates that a rational agent's preferences over two choice options should not be influenced by the absence or presence of additional options. We show that the argumentation semantics as proposed in Dung's classical paper, as well as all of a range of other semantics we evaluate do not fulfill this newly created principle. Consequently, we investigate how structural properties of argumentation frameworks impact the reference independence principle, and propose a restriction to argumentation expansions that allows all of the evaluated semantics to fulfill the requirements for economically rational argumentation-based choice. For this purpose, we define the rational man's expansion as a normal and noncyclic expansion. Finally, we put reference independence into the context of preference-based argumentation and show that for this argumentation variant, which explicitly model preferences, the rational man's expansion cannot ensure reference independence.
Why explainable AI is indispensable to Zillow's business
Zillow, an online marketplace that facilitates the buying, selling, renting, financing, and remodeling of homes, employs lots of AI technologies to do things like estimate home prices. But the output of AI systems like these can be opaque, creating a "black box" problem where practitioners and customers can't audit the systems properly. Without transparency, serious problems like algorithmic bias can persist undetected, and trust in the models becomes impossible. For obvious ethical reasons, this is why explainable AI (XAI) is so crucial to the creation and deployment of AI systems, but pragmatically, it's also key to the success of AI-powered products and services from companies like Zillow. David Fagnan, director of applied science on the Zillow Offers team, discussed with VentureBeat how and why XAI is indispensable for the company.
Formal Verification of Debates in Argumentation Theory
Jha, Ria, Belardinelli, Francesco, Toni, Francesca
Humans engage in informal debates on a daily basis. By expressing their opinions and ideas in an argumentative fashion, they are able to gain a deeper understanding of a given problem and in some cases, find the best possible course of actions towards resolving it. In this paper, we develop a methodology to verify debates formalised as abstract argumentation frameworks. We first present a translation from debates to transition systems. Such transition systems can model debates and represent their evolution over time using a finite set of states. We then formalise relevant debate properties using temporal and strategy logics. These formalisations, along with a debate transition system, allow us to verify whether a given debate satisfies certain properties. The verification process can be automated using model checkers. Therefore, we also measure their performance when verifying debates, and use the results to discuss the feasibility of model checking debates.
Explainability Fact Sheets: A Framework for Systematic Assessment of Explainable Approaches
Explanations in Machine Learning come in many forms, but a consensus regarding their desired properties is yet to emerge. In this paper we introduce a taxonomy and a set of descriptors that can be used to characterise and systematically assess explainable systems along five key dimensions: functional, operational, usability, safety and validation. In order to design a comprehensive and representative taxonomy and associated descriptors we surveyed the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence literature, extracting the criteria and desiderata that other authors have proposed or implicitly used in their research. The survey includes papers introducing new explainability algorithms to see what criteria are used to guide their development and how these algorithms are evaluated, as well as papers proposing such criteria from both computer science and social science perspectives. This novel framework allows to systematically compare and contrast explainability approaches, not just to better understand their capabilities but also to identify discrepancies between their theoretical qualities and properties of their implementations. We developed an operationalisation of the framework in the form of Explainability Fact Sheets, which enable researchers and practitioners alike to quickly grasp capabilities and limitations of a particular explainable method. When used as a Work Sheet, our taxonomy can guide the development of new explainability approaches by aiding in their critical evaluation along the five proposed dimensions.
Toward XAI for Intelligent Tutoring Systems: A Case Study
Putnam, Vanessa, Riegel, Lea, Conati, Cristina
Our research is a step toward understanding when explanations of AIdriven hints and feedback are useful in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). We added an explanation functionality for the adaptive hints provided by the Adaptive CSP (ACSP) applet, an inte lligent interactive simulation that helps students learn an algorithm for constraint satisfaction problems. We present the design of the explanation functionality and the results of an exploratory study to evaluate how students use it, including an analysis of how students' experience with the explanation functionality is affected by several personality traits and abilities . Our results show a significant impact of a measure of curiosity and the Agreeableness personality trait and provide insight toward des igning personalized Explainable AI (XAI) for ITS .