Explanation & Argumentation
Towards Fine-Grained Interpretability: Counterfactual Explanations for Misclassification with Saliency Partition
Zhang, Lintong, Yin, Kang, Lee, Seong-Whan
Attribution-based explanation techniques capture key patterns to enhance visual interpretability; however, these patterns often lack the granularity needed for insight in fine-grained tasks, particularly in cases of model misclassifica-tion, where explanations may be insufficiently detailed. T o address this limitation, we propose a fine-grained counterfactual explanation framework that generates both object-level and part-level interpretability, addressing two fundamental questions: (1) which fine-grained features contribute to model misclassification, and (2) where dominant local features influence counterfactual adjustments. Our approach yields explainable counterfactuals in a non-generative manner by quantifying similarity and weighting component contributions within regions of interest between correctly classified and misclassified samples. Furthermore, we introduce a saliency partition module grounded in Shapley value contributions, isolating features with region-specific relevance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in capturing more granular, intuitively meaningful regions, surpassing fine-grained methods.
Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation
Kandala, Ananth, Kandala, Ratna, Moharir, Akshata Kishore, Manchanda, Niva, Singh, Sunaina
Mental health communication in India is linguistically fragmented, culturally diverse, and often underrepresented in clinical NLP. Current health ontologies and mental health resources are dominated by diagnostic frameworks centered on English or Western culture, leaving a gap in representing patient distress expressions in Indian languages. We propose cross-linguistic graphs of patient stress expressions (CL-PDE), a framework for building cross-lingual mental health ontologies through graph-based methods that capture culturally embedded expressions of distress, align them across languages, and link them with clinical terminology. Our approach addresses critical gaps in healthcare communication by grounding AI systems in culturally valid representations, allowing more inclusive and patient-centric NLP tools for mental health care in multilingual contexts.
TriShGAN: Enhancing Sparsity and Robustness in Multivariate Time Series Counterfactuals Explanation
Ma, Hongnan, Shi, Yiwei, Sun, Guanxiong, Yang, Mengyue, Liu, Weiru
In decision-making processes, stakeholders often rely on counterfactual explanations, which provide suggestions about what should be changed in the queried instance to alter the outcome of an AI system. However, generating these explanations for multivariate time series presents challenges due to their complex, multi-dimensional nature. Traditional Nearest Unlike Neighbor-based methods typically substitute subsequences in a queried time series with influential subsequences from an NUN, which is not always realistic in real-world scenarios due to the rigid direct substitution. Counterfactual with Residual Generative Adversarial Networks-based methods aim to address this by learning from the distribution of observed data to generate synthetic counterfactual explanations. However, these methods primarily focus on minimizing the cost from the queried time series to the counterfactual explanations and often neglect the importance of distancing the counterfactual explanation from the decision boundary. This oversight can result in explanations that no longer qualify as counterfactual if minor changes occur within the model. To generate a more robust counterfactual explanation, we introduce TriShGAN, under the CounteRGAN framework enhanced by the incorporation of triplet loss. This unsupervised learning approach uses distance metric learning to encourage the counterfactual explanations not only to remain close to the queried time series but also to capture the feature distribution of the instance with the desired outcome, thereby achieving a better balance between minimal cost and robustness. Additionally, we integrate a Shapelet Extractor that strategically selects the most discriminative parts of the high-dimensional queried time series to enhance the sparsity of counterfactual explanation and efficiency of the training process.
Explainable AI For Early Detection Of Sepsis
Thakur, Atharva, Dhumal, Shruti
Department of Multidisciplinary Engineering (AI & DS) Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune, 411037, Maharashtra, India Abstract - Sepsis is a potentially fatal medical disorder that needs to be identified and treated right away to avoid fatalities. It must be quickly identified and treated in order to stop it from developing into severe sepsis, septic shock, and multi-organ failure. Sepsis remains a significant problem for doctors despite advancements in medical technology and treatment methods. The beginning of the disease has been successfully predicted by machine learning models in recent years, but due to their black-box character, it is challenging to interpret these predictions and comprehend the underlying illness mechanisms. In this research, we propose a comprehensible AI method for sepsis analysis that combines machine learning with clinical knowledge and expertise in the domain. Our method allows clinicians to understand and verify the model's predictions based on clinical expertise and preexisting beliefs, in addition to providing precise predictions of the onset of sepsis. Keywords - Sepsis, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Explainable AI, Sensitivity Analysis I. INTRODUCTION As the world continues to advance in technology, the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is becoming more apparent.
Maccabi fan ban was due to hooliganism, say police
West Midlands Police has defended keeping silent over the significant hooliganism among Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, which it now confirms is the reason they were banned from attending the Europa League clash with Aston Villa. More than 700 officers from 20 police forces were deployed near Villa Park on Thursday, where hundreds took part in demonstrations over the controversial decision. When it emerged in October that fans of the Israeli club would not be welcome, senior MPs, including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, said it amounted to antisemitism. Jack Angelides, CEO of Maccabi Tel Aviv, told the BBC their fans being banned meant it was time for some introspection and retrospection. Chief Constable Craig Guildford has been asked to appear before The Home Affairs Committee to explain the reasoning behind the ban, by Birmingham's Safety Advisory Group.
Fair and Explainable Credit-Scoring under Concept Drift: Adaptive Explanation Frameworks for Evolving Populations
Evolving borrower behaviors, shifting economic conditions, and changing regulatory landscapes continuously reshape the data distributions underlying modern credit-scoring systems. Conventional explainability techniques, such as SHAP, assume static data and fixed background distributions, making their explanations unstable and potentially unfair when concept drift occurs. This study addresses that challenge by developing adaptive explanation frameworks that recalibrate interpretability and fairness in dynamically evolving credit models. Using a multi-year credit dataset, we integrate predictive modeling via XGBoost with three adaptive SHAP variants: (A) per-slice explanation reweighting that adjusts for feature distribution shifts, (B) drift-aware SHAP rebaselining with sliding-window background samples, and (C) online surrogate calibration using incremental Ridge regression. Each method is benchmarked against static SHAP explanations using metrics of predictive performance (AUC, F1), directional and rank stability (cosine, Kendall tau), and fairness (demographic parity and recalibration). Results show that adaptive methods, particularly rebaselined and surrogate-based explanations, substantially improve temporal stability and reduce disparate impact across demographic groups without degrading predictive accuracy. Robustness tests, including counterfactual perturbations, background sensitivity analysis, and proxy-variable detection, confirm the resilience of adaptive explanations under real-world drift conditions. These findings establish adaptive explainability as a practical mechanism for sustaining transparency, accountability, and ethical reliability in data-driven credit systems, and more broadly, in any domain where decision models evolve with population change.
Multi-Task Learning for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Gastrointestinal VQA
Safwan, Itbaan, Shaikh, Muhammad Annas, Haaris, Muhammad, Khan, Ramail, Tahir, Muhammad Atif
We present a multi-task framework for the MediaEval Medico 2025 challenge, leveraging a LoRA-tuned Florence-2 model for simultaneous visual question answering (VQA), explanation generation, and visual grounding. The proposed system integrates three curated datasets: (1) Kvasir-VQA-x1 for question-answer learning, (2) a synthetically enriched explanation dataset offering structured medical reasoning, and (3) text-to-region pairs linking visual features with segmentation masks. This multi-task setup enables the model to jointly learn visual grounding, reasoning, and interpretation, producing responses that are both accurate and interpretable. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our approach substantially improves over single-task baselines in both answer accuracy and visual localization, highlighting the effectiveness of grounded multi-task learning for medical VQA applications.
Guided by Stars: Interpretable Concept Learning Over Time Series via Temporal Logic Semantics
Ferfoglia, Irene, Silvetti, Simone, Saveri, Gaia, Nenzi, Laura, Bortolussi, Luca
Time series classification is a task of paramount importance, as this kind of data often arises in safety-critical applications. However, it is typically tackled with black-box deep learning methods, making it hard for humans to understand the rationale behind their output. To take on this challenge, we propose a novel approach, STELLE (Signal Temporal logic Embedding for Logically-grounded Learning and Explanation), a neuro-symbolic framework that unifies classification and explanation through direct embedding of trajectories into a space of temporal logic concepts. By introducing a novel STL-inspired kernel that maps raw time series to their alignment with predefined STL formulae, our model jointly optimises accuracy and interpretability, as each prediction is accompanied by the most relevant logical concepts that characterise it. This yields (i) local explanations as human-readable STL conditions justifying individual predictions, and (ii) global explanations as class-characterising formulae. Experiments demonstrate that STELLE achieves competitive accuracy while providing logically faithful explanations, validated on diverse real-world benchmarks.
Explanations Go Linear: Interpretable and Individual Latent Encoding for Post-hoc Explainability
Piaggesi, Simone, Guidotti, Riccardo, Giannotti, Fosca, Pedreschi, Dino
Post-hoc explainability is essential for understanding black-box machine learning models. Surrogate-based techniques are widely used for local and global model-agnostic explanations but have significant limitations. Local surrogates capture non-linearities but are computationally expensive and sensitive to parameters, while global surrogates are more efficient but struggle with complex local behaviors. In this paper, we present ILLUME, a flexible and interpretable framework grounded in representation learning, that can be integrated with various surrogate models to provide explanations for any black-box classifier. Specifically, our approach combines a globally trained surrogate with instance-specific linear transformations learned with a meta-encoder to generate both local and global explanations. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ILLUME in producing feature attributions and decision rules that are not only accurate but also robust and faithful to the black-box, thus providing a unified explanation framework that effectively addresses the limitations of traditional surrogate methods.