As complex AI systems further prove to be an integral part of our lives, a persistent and critical problem is the underlying black-box nature of such products and systems. In pursuit of productivity enhancements, one must not forget the need for various technology to boost the overall trustworthiness of such AI systems. One example, which is studied extensively in this work, is the domain of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Research works in this scope are centred around the objective of making AI systems more transparent and interpretable, to further boost reliability and trust in using them. In this work, we discuss the various motivation for XAI and its approaches, the underlying challenges that XAI faces, and some open problems that we believe deserve further efforts to look into. We also provide a brief discussion of various XAI approaches for image processing, and finally discuss some future directions, to hopefully express and motivate the positive development of the XAI research space.

The increasing complexity of machine learning models in computer vision, particularly in face verification, requires the development of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to enhance interpretability and transparency. This study extends previous work by integrating semantic concepts derived from human cognitive processes into XAI frameworks to bridge the comprehension gap between model outputs and human understanding. We propose a novel approach combining global and local explanations, using semantic features defined by user-selected facial landmarks to generate similarity maps and textual explanations via large language models (LLMs). The methodology was validated through quantitative experiments and user feedback, demonstrating improved interpretability. Results indicate that our semantic-based approach, particularly the most detailed set, offers a more nuanced understanding of model decisions than traditional methods. User studies highlight a preference for our semantic explanations over traditional pixelbased heatmaps, emphasizing the benefits of human-centric interpretability in AI. This work contributes to the ongoing efforts to create XAI frameworks that align AI models behaviour with human cognitive processes, fostering trust and acceptance in critical applications.

Recent work has investigated the concept of adversarial attacks on explainable AI (XAI) in the NLP domain with a focus on examining the vulnerability of local surrogate methods such as Lime to adversarial perturbations or small changes on the input of a machine learning (ML) model. In such attacks, the generated explanation is manipulated while the meaning and structure of the original input remain similar under the ML model. Such attacks are especially alarming when XAI is used as a basis for decision making (e.g., prescribing drugs based on AI medical predictors) or for legal action (e.g., legal dispute involving AI software). Although weaknesses across many XAI methods have been shown to exist, the reasons behind why remain little explored. Central to this XAI manipulation is the similarity measure used to calculate how one explanation differs from another. A poor choice of similarity measure can lead to erroneous conclusions about the stability or adversarial robustness of an XAI method. Therefore, this work investigates a variety of similarity measures designed for text-based ranked lists referenced in related work to determine their comparative suitability for use. We find that many measures are overly sensitive, resulting in erroneous estimates of stability. We then propose a weighting scheme for text-based data that incorporates the synonymity between the features within an explanation, providing more accurate estimates of the actual weakness of XAI methods to adversarial examples.

Explainable AI (XAI) has seen a surge in recent interest with the proliferation of powerful but intractable black-box models. Moreover, XAI has come under fire for techniques that may not offer reliable explanations. As many of the methods in XAI are themselves models, adversarial examples have been prominent in the literature surrounding the effectiveness of XAI, with the objective of these examples being to alter the explanation while maintaining the output of the original model. For explanations in natural language, it is natural to use measures found in the domain of information retrieval for use with ranked lists to guide the adversarial XAI process. We show that the standard implementation of these measures are poorly suited for the comparison of explanations in adversarial XAI and amend them by using information that is discarded, the synonymity of perturbed words. This synonymity weighting produces more accurate estimates of the actual weakness of XAI methods to adversarial examples.

In cooperative human decision-making, agreements are often not total; a partial degree of agreement is sufficient to commit to a decision and move on, as long as one is somewhat confident that the involved parties are likely to stand by their commitment in the future, given no drastic unexpected changes. In this paper, we introduce the notion of agreement scenarios that allow artificial autonomous agents to reach such agreements, using formal models of argumentation, in particular abstract argumentation and value-based argumentation. We introduce the notions of degrees of satisfaction and (minimum, mean, and median) agreement, as well as a measure of the impact a value in a value-based argumentation framework has on these notions. We then analyze how degrees of agreement are affected when agreement scenarios are expanded with new information, to shed light on the reliability of partial agreements in dynamic scenarios. An implementation of the introduced concepts is provided as part of an argumentation-based reasoning software library.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays an important role in improving the transparency and reliability of complex machine learning models, especially in critical domains such as cybersecurity. Despite the prevalence of heuristic interpretation methods such as SHAP and LIME, these techniques often lack formal guarantees and may produce inconsistent local explanations. To fulfill this need, few tools have emerged that use formal methods to provide formal explanations. Among these, XReason uses a SAT solver to generate formal instance-level explanation for XGBoost models. In this paper, we extend the XReason tool to support LightGBM models as well as class-level explanations. Additionally, we implement a mechanism to generate and detect adversarial examples in XReason. We evaluate the efficiency and accuracy of our approach on the CICIDS-2017 dataset, a widely used benchmark for detecting network attacks.

Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is a commonly used algorithm to estimate transformation between two point clouds. The key idea of this work is to leverage recent advances in explainable AI for probabilistic ICP methods that provide uncertainty estimates. Concretely, we propose a method that can explain why a probabilistic ICP method produced a particular output. Our method is based on kernel SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). With this, we assign an importance value to common sources of uncertainty in ICP such as sensor noise, occlusion, and ambiguous environments. The results of the experiment show that this explanation method can reasonably explain the uncertainty sources, providing a step towards robots that know when and why they failed in a human interpretable manner

Building trust between humans and robots has long interested the robotics community. Various studies have aimed to clarify the factors that influence the development of user trust. In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) environments, a critical aspect of trust development is the robot's ability to make its behavior understandable. The concept of an eXplainable Autonomous Robot (XAR) addresses this requirement. However, giving a robot self-explanatory abilities is a complex task. Robot behavior includes multiple skills and diverse subsystems. This complexity led to research into a wide range of methods for generating explanations about robot behavior. This paper presents a systematic literature review that analyzes existing strategies for generating explanations in robots and studies the current XAR trends. Results indicate promising advancements in explainability systems. However, these systems are still unable to fully cover the complex behavior of autonomous robots. Furthermore, we also identify a lack of consensus on the theoretical concept of explainability, and the need for a robust methodology to assess explainability methods and tools has been identified.

Recent work revealed a tight connection between adversarial robustness and restricted forms of symbolic explanations, namely distance-based (formal) explanations. This connection is significant because it represents a first step towards making the computation of symbolic explanations as efficient as deciding the existence of adversarial examples, especially for highly complex machine learning (ML) models. However, a major performance bottleneck remains, because of the very large number of features that ML models may possess, in particular for deep neural networks. This paper proposes novel algorithms to compute the so-called contrastive explanations for ML models with a large number of features, by leveraging on adversarial robustness. Furthermore, the paper also proposes novel algorithms for listing explanations and finding smallest contrastive explanations. The experimental results demonstrate the performance gains achieved by the novel algorithms proposed in this paper.

Wireless communication has evolved significantly, with 6G offering groundbreaking capabilities, particularly for IoT. However, the integration of IoT into 6G presents new security challenges, expanding the attack surface due to vulnerabilities introduced by advanced technologies such as open RAN, terahertz (THz) communication, IRS, massive MIMO, and AI. Emerging threats like AI exploitation, virtualization risks, and evolving attacks, including data manipulation and signal interference, further complicate security efforts. As 6G standards are set to be finalized by 2030, work continues to align security measures with technological advances. However, substantial gaps remain in frameworks designed to secure integrated IoT and 6G systems. Our research addresses these challenges by utilizing tree-based machine learning algorithms to manage complex datasets and evaluate feature importance. We apply data balancing techniques to ensure fair attack representation and use SHAP and LIME to improve model transparency. By aligning feature importance with XAI methods and cross-validating for consistency, we boost model accuracy and enhance IoT security within the 6G ecosystem.