Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a pillar of Trustworthy AI and aims to bring transparency in complex models that are opaque by nature. Despite the benefits of incorporating explanations in models, an urgent need is found in addressing the privacy concerns of providing this additional information to end users. In this article, we conduct a scoping review of existing literature to elicit details on the conflict between privacy and explainability. Using the standard methodology for scoping review, we extracted 57 articles from 1,943 studies published from January 2019 to December 2024. The review addresses 3 research questions to present readers with more understanding of the topic: (1) what are the privacy risks of releasing explanations in AI systems? (2) what current methods have researchers employed to achieve privacy preservation in XAI systems? (3) what constitutes a privacy preserving explanation? Based on the knowledge synthesized from the selected studies, we categorize the privacy risks and preservation methods in XAI and propose the characteristics of privacy preserving explanations to aid researchers and practitioners in understanding the requirements of XAI that is privacy compliant. Lastly, we identify the challenges in balancing privacy with other system desiderata and provide recommendations for achieving privacy preserving XAI. We expect that this review will shed light on the complex relationship of privacy and explainability, both being the fundamental principles of Trustworthy AI.

This work presents a conceptual framework for causal concept-based post-hoc Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), based on the requirements that explanations for non-interpretable models should be understandable as well as faithful to the model being explained. Local and global explanations are generated by calculating the probability of sufficiency of concept interventions. Example explanations are presented, generated with a proof-of-concept model made to explain classifiers trained on the CelebA dataset. Understandability is demonstrated through a clear concept-based vocabulary, subject to an implicit causal interpretation. Fidelity is addressed by highlighting important framework assumptions, stressing that the context of explanation interpretation must align with the context of explanation generation.

Machine learning models, by virtue of training, learn a large repertoire of decision rules for any given input, and any one of these may suffice to justify a prediction. However, in high-dimensional input spaces, such rules are difficult to identify and interpret. In this paper, we introduce EXP-CAM: an explanation generation and circuit discovery approach using Classifier Activation Matching. EXP-CAM can generate minimal and faithful explanations for the decisions of pre-trained image classifiers that not only preserve the model's decision but are also concise and human-readable. We aim to identify minimal explanations that not only preserve the model's decision but are also concise and human-readable. To achieve this, we train a lightweight auto-encoder to produce binary masks that learns to highlight the decision-wise critical regions of an image while discarding irrelevant background. The training objective integrates activation alignment across multiple layers, consistency at the output label, priors that encourage sparsity, and compactness, along with a robustness constraint that enforces faithfulness. The minimal explanations so generated also lead us to mechanistically interpreting the model internals. In this regard we also introduce a circuit readout procedure wherein using the explanation's forward pass and gradients, we identify active channels and construct a channel-level graph, scoring inter-layer edges by ingress weight magnitude times source activation and feature-to-class links by classifier weight magnitude times feature activation. Together, these contributions provide a practical bridge between minimal input-level explanations and a mechanistic understanding of the internal computations driving model decisions.

Video-based AI systems are increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving and healthcare. However, interpreting their decisions remains challenging due to the inherent spatiotemporal complexity of video data and the opacity of deep learning models. Existing explanation techniques often suffer from limited temporal coherence and a lack of actionable causal insights. Current counterfactual explanation methods typically do not incorporate guidance from the target model, reducing semantic fidelity and practical utility. We introduce Latent Diffusion for Video Counterfactual Explanations (LD-ViCE), a novel framework designed to explain the behavior of video-based AI models. Compared to previous approaches, LD-ViCE reduces the computational costs of generating explanations by operating in latent space using a state-of-the-art diffusion model, while producing realistic and interpretable counterfactuals through an additional refinement step. Experiments on three diverse video datasets - EchoNet-Dynamic (cardiac ultrasound), FERV39k (facial expression), and Something-Something V2 (action recognition) with multiple target models covering both classification and regression tasks, demonstrate that LD-ViCE generalizes well and achieves state-of-the-art performance. On the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset, LD-ViCE achieves significantly higher regression accuracy than prior methods and exhibits high temporal consistency, while the refinement stage further improves perceptual quality. Qualitative analyses confirm that LD-ViCE produces semantically meaningful and temporally coherent explanations, providing actionable insights into model behavior. LD-ViCE advances the trustworthiness and interpretability of video-based AI systems through visually coherent counterfactual explanations.

Concept-based explanations have emerged as an effective approach within Explainable Artificial Intelligence, enabling interpretable insights by aligning model decisions with human-understandable concepts. However, existing methods rely on computationally intensive procedures and struggle to efficiently capture complex, semantic concepts. This work introduces the Concept Directions via Latent Clustering (CDLC), which extracts global, class-specific concept directions by clustering latent difference vectors derived from factual and diffusion-generated counterfactual image pairs. CDLC reduces storage requirements by 4.6 and accelerates concept discovery by 5.3 compared to the baseline method, while requiring no GPU for clustering, thereby enabling efficient extraction of multidimensional semantic concepts across latent dimensions. This approach is validated on a real-world skin lesion dataset, demonstrating that the extracted concept directions align with clinically recognized dermoscopic features and, in some cases, reveal dataset-specific biases or unknown biomarkers. These results highlight that CDLC is interpretable, scalable, and applicable across high-stakes domains and diverse data modalities. Introduction In high-stakes applications, such as medical diagnosis, financial risk assessment, and autonomous driving, understanding the rationale behind a neural network's decision is often as important as the decision itself. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) [1, 2] has emerged as a critical research area, aiming to bridge the gap between high-performing black-box models and human interpretability. Among the various XAI paradigms, concept-based explanations [3, 4] have gained particular attention due to their ability to express model behavior in terms of high-level, semantically meaningful concepts, rather than low-level feature weights or pixel-based saliency maps [5, 6]. By aligning explanations with concepts recognized by domain experts, these methods facilitate trust [7, 8], debugging [9], and regulatory compliance [10, 11].

Currently, machine learning is widely used across various domains, including time series data analysis. However, some machine learning models function as black boxes, making interpretability a critical concern. One approach to address this issue is counterfactual explanation (CE), which aims to provide insights into model predictions. This study focuses on the relatively underexplored problem of generating counterfactual explanations for time series forecasting. We propose a method for extracting CEs in time series forecasting using exogenous variables, which are frequently encountered in fields such as business and marketing. In addition, we present methods for analyzing the influence of each variable over an entire time series, generating CEs by altering only specific variables, and evaluating the quality of the resulting CEs. We validate the proposed method through theoretical analysis and empirical experiments, showcasing its accuracy and practical applicability. These contributions are expected to support real-world decision-making based on time series data analysis.

Counterfactual explanations enhance the actionable interpretability of machine learning models by identifying the minimal changes required to achieve a desired outcome of the model. However, existing methods often ignore the complex dependencies in real-world datasets, leading to unrealistic or impractical modifications. Motivated by cybersecurity applications in the email marketing domain, we propose a method for generating Diverse, Actionable, and kNowledge-Constrained Explanations (DANCE), which incorporates feature dependencies and causal constraints to ensure plausibility and real-world feasibility of counterfactuals. Our method learns linear and nonlinear constraints from data or integrates expert-provided dependency graphs, ensuring counterfactuals are plausible and actionable. By maintaining consistency with feature relationships, the method produces explanations that align with real-world constraints. Additionally, it balances plausibility, diversity, and sparsity, effectively addressing key limitations in existing algorithms. The work is developed based on a real-life case study with Freshmail, the largest email marketing company in Poland and supported by a joint R&D project Sendguard. Furthermore, we provide an extensive evaluation using 140 public datasets, which highlights its ability to generate meaningful, domain-relevant counterfactuals that outperform other existing approaches based on widely used metrics. The source code for reproduction of the results can be found in a GitHub repository we provide.

Over the past three decades, formal argumentation has established itself as a prominent research area within Artificial Intelligence, owing to its versatility in addressing various reasoning tasks. These include nonmonotonic reasoning, multi-agent systems, rule-based systems, and the analysis of debates or dialogues. Formal argumentation provides a unifying framework for representing diverse reasoning approaches, ranging from highly skeptical to more permissive forms of inference (for a comprehensive introduction to this area, see the handbook [4]). At the heart of formal argumentation lies Dung's abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) [15], which are modeled as directed graphs, where nodes correspond to arguments, and directed edges represent the attack relations between them. AFs serve as a common foundational core across various reasoning systems in formal argumentation, with many extensions and refinements, e.g.

While recent work has extended CoT to multimodal settings, achieving state-of-the-art results on science question answering benchmarks like ScienceQA, the generalizabil-ity of these approaches across diverse domains remains un-derexplored. This work presents a comprehensive analysis of Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (Multimodal-CoT) reasoning, evaluating its effectiveness on the A-OKVQA, OKVQA and ChartQA datasets, which requires broad commonsense and world knowledge beyond scientific reasoning. We implement the two-stage framework proposed by Zhang et al. [3], which separates rationale generation from answer inference and integrates vision features through a gated fusion mechanism with T5-based language models. Through systematic ablation studies, we analyze the contributions of vision features, rationale quality, and architectural choices. Our findings reveal that while vision integration significantly reduces hallucination in rationale generation, the effectiveness of CoT reasoning varies substantially across question types, with commonsense reasoning presenting particular challenges. This work provides practical insights for researchers implementing multimodal reasoning systems and identifies key areas for future improvement in cross-domain generalization.

Both humans and machine learning models learn from experience, particularly in safety- and reliability-critical domains. While psychology seeks to understand human cognition, the field of Explainable AI (XAI) develops methods to interpret machine learning models. This study bridges these domains by applying computational tools from XAI to analyze human learning. We modeled human behavior during a complex real-world task -- tuning a particle accelerator -- by constructing graphs of operator subtasks. Applying techniques such as community detection and hierarchical clustering to archival operator data, we reveal how operators decompose the problem into simpler components and how these problem-solving structures evolve with expertise. Our findings illuminate how humans develop efficient strategies in the absence of globally optimal solutions, and demonstrate the utility of XAI-based methods for quantitatively studying human cognition.