A 2019 survey found that 73 of 84 prominent AI strategy documents referenced transparency or explainability [81]. Influential intergovernmental bodies such as United Nations agencies and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have put forth transparency and explainability as key mechanisms for ensuring that algorithmic systems produce beneficial outcomes and uphold "democratic values" [121, 143]. Algorithmic transparency and explainability can serve many purposes, but some of the most important are legal in nature: allowing lawmakers to understand and craft effective rules for algorithmic systems, enabling a broader set of stakeholders to be aware of (and obtain redress from) algorithmic harms, and assisting regulators in exercising meaningful oversight over the use of algorithms [81, 109]. To serve these objectives, transparency measures and explanation techniques must be developed with an understanding of the specific goals, constraints, and incentives of policymakers. This paper aims to help bridge the gap between policymakers and the explanation research community, helping researchers to better understand and respond to the needs of policymakers. To this end, it provides case studies illustrating five uses for algorithmic transparency and explanation in policy settings. These case studies (Table 1) were selected to span four axes: the spectrum from explanation to transparency (including both requirements for specific explanation techniques, like those developed by the machine learning research community, and broader forms of transparency requirements); different jurisdictions (including U.S. federal regulators, U.S. states, and the EU); policy actors with differing technical and financial capacities; and a diverse array of policy approaches (including prescriptive technical rules, process-oriented rules, nonbinding guidelines, and modifications to legal procedures). Building on these case studies, this paper argues that explanation techniques developed by the research community can be too complex, too uncertain, or too restricted to satisfy the constraints that policymakers and the law operate under in practice. As a result, explanation is often limited in its ability to enable meaningful public policy solutions to algorithmic harms.

Recent legislation proposals have significantly increased the demand for eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in many businesses, especially in so-called `high-risk' domains, such as recruitment. Within recruitment, AI has become commonplace, mainly in the form of job recommender systems (JRSs), which try to match candidates to vacancies, and vice versa. However, common XAI techniques often fall short in this domain due to the different levels and types of expertise of the individuals involved, making explanations difficult to generalize. To determine the explanation preferences of the different stakeholder types - candidates, recruiters, and companies - we created and validated a semi-structured interview guide. Using grounded theory, we structurally analyzed the results of these interviews and found that different stakeholder types indeed have strongly differing explanation preferences. Candidates indicated a preference for brief, textual explanations that allow them to quickly judge potential matches. On the other hand, hiring managers preferred visual graph-based explanations that provide a more technical and comprehensive overview at a glance. Recruiters found more exhaustive textual explanations preferable, as those provided them with more talking points to convince both parties of the match. Based on these findings, we describe guidelines on how to design an explanation interface that fulfills the requirements of all three stakeholder types. Furthermore, we provide the validated interview guide, which can assist future research in determining the explanation preferences of different stakeholder types.

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) exemplify how to minimally modify a feature vector to achieve a different prediction for an instance. CFEs can enhance informational fairness and trustworthiness, and provide suggestions for users who receive adverse predictions. However, recent research has shown that multiple CFEs can be offered for the same instance or instances with slight differences. Multiple CFEs provide flexible choices and cover diverse desiderata for user selection. However, individual fairness and model reliability will be damaged if unstable CFEs with different costs are returned. Existing methods fail to exploit flexibility and address the concerns of non-robustness simultaneously. To address these issues, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective solution named Counterfactual Explanations with Minimal Satisfiable Perturbations (CEMSP). Specifically, CEMSP constrains changing values of abnormal features with the help of their semantically meaningful normal ranges. For efficiency, we model the problem as a Boolean satisfiability problem to modify as few features as possible. Additionally, CEMSP is a general framework and can easily accommodate more practical requirements, e.g., casualty and actionability. Compared to existing methods, we conduct comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate that our method provides more robust explanations while preserving flexibility.

Counterfactuals operationalised through algorithmic recourse have become a powerful tool to make artificial intelligence systems explainable. Conceptually, given an individual classified as y -- the factual -- we seek actions such that their prediction becomes the desired class y' -- the counterfactual. This process offers algorithmic recourse that is (1) easy to customise and interpret, and (2) directly aligned with the goals of each individual. However, the properties of a "good" counterfactual are still largely debated; it remains an open challenge to effectively locate a counterfactual along with its corresponding recourse. Some strategies use gradient-driven methods, but these offer no guarantees on the feasibility of the recourse and are open to adversarial attacks on carefully created manifolds. This can lead to unfairness and lack of robustness. Other methods are data-driven, which mostly addresses the feasibility problem at the expense of privacy, security and secrecy as they require access to the entire training data set. Here, we introduce LocalFACE, a model-agnostic technique that composes feasible and actionable counterfactual explanations using locally-acquired information at each step of the algorithmic recourse. Our explainer preserves the privacy of users by only leveraging data that it specifically requires to construct actionable algorithmic recourse, and protects the model by offering transparency solely in the regions deemed necessary for the intervention.

An optimal delivery of arguments is key to persuasion in any debate, both for humans and for AI systems. This requires the use of clear and fluent claims relevant to the given debate. Prior work has studied the automatic assessment of argument quality extensively. Yet, no approach actually improves the quality so far. To fill this gap, this paper proposes the task of claim optimization: to rewrite argumentative claims in order to optimize their delivery. As multiple types of optimization are possible, we approach this task by first generating a diverse set of candidate claims using a large language model, such as BART, taking into account contextual information. Then, the best candidate is selected using various quality metrics. In automatic and human evaluation on an English-language corpus, our quality-based candidate selection outperforms several baselines, improving 60% of all claims (worsening 16% only). Follow-up analyses reveal that, beyond copy editing, our approach often specifies claims with details, whereas it adds less evidence than humans do. Moreover, its capabilities generalize well to other domains, such as instructional texts.

In swarm robotics, agents interact through local roles to solve complex tasks beyond an individual's ability. Even though swarms are capable of carrying out some operations without the need for human intervention, many safety-critical applications still call for human operators to control and monitor the swarm. There are novel challenges to effective Human-Swarm Interaction (HSI) that are only beginning to be addressed. Explainability is one factor that can facilitate effective and trustworthy HSI and improve the overall performance of Human-Swarm team. Explainability was studied across various Human-AI domains, such as Human-Robot Interaction and Human-Centered ML. However, it is still ambiguous whether explanations studied in Human-AI literature would be beneficial in Human-Swarm research and development. Furthermore, the literature lacks foundational research on the prerequisites for explainability requirements in swarm robotics, i.e., what kind of questions an explainable swarm is expected to answer, and what types of explanations a swarm is expected to generate. By surveying 26 swarm experts, we seek to answer these questions and identify challenges experts faced to generate explanations in Human-Swarm environments. Our work contributes insights into defining a new area of research of eXplainable Swarm (xSwarm) which looks at how explainability can be implemented and developed in swarm systems. This paper opens the discussion on xSwarm and paves the way for more research in the field.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often an integral part of modern decision support systems (DSSs). The best-performing predictive models used in AI-based DSSs lack transparency. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to create AI systems that can explain their rationale to human users. Local explanations in XAI can provide information about the causes of individual predictions in terms of feature importance. However, a critical drawback of existing local explanation methods is their inability to quantify the uncertainty associated with a feature's importance. This paper introduces an extension of a feature importance explanation method, Calibrated Explanations (CE), previously only supporting classification, with support for standard regression and probabilistic regression, i.e., the probability that the target is above an arbitrary threshold. The extension for regression keeps all the benefits of CE, such as calibration of the prediction from the underlying model with confidence intervals, uncertainty quantification of feature importance, and allows both factual and counterfactual explanations. CE for standard regression provides fast, reliable, stable, and robust explanations. CE for probabilistic regression provides an entirely new way of creating probabilistic explanations from any ordinary regression model and with a dynamic selection of thresholds. The performance of CE for probabilistic regression regarding stability and speed is comparable to LIME. The method is model agnostic with easily understood conditional rules. An implementation in Python is freely available on GitHub and for installation using pip making the results in this paper easily replicable.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated its widespread adoption in primary medical services, addressing the demand-supply imbalance in healthcare. Vision Transformers (ViT) have emerged as state-of-the-art computer vision models, benefiting from self-attention modules. However, compared to traditional machine-learning approaches, deep-learning models are complex and are often treated as a "black box" that can cause uncertainty regarding how they operate. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) refers to methods that explain and interpret machine learning models' inner workings and how they come to decisions, which is especially important in the medical domain to guide the healthcare decision-making process. This review summarises recent ViT advancements and interpretative approaches to understanding the decision-making process of ViT, enabling transparency in medical diagnosis applications.

ProbLog is a popular probabilistic logic programming language/tool, widely used for applications requiring to deal with inherent uncertainties in structured domains. In this paper we study connections between ProbLog and a variant of another well-known formalism combining symbolic reasoning and reasoning under uncertainty, i.e. probabilistic argumentation. Specifically, we show that ProbLog is an instance of a form of Probabilistic Abstract Argumentation (PAA) that builds upon Assumption-Based Argumentation (ABA). The connections pave the way towards equipping ProbLog with alternative semantics, inherited from PAA/PABA, as well as obtaining novel argumentation semantics for PAA/PABA, leveraging on prior connections between ProbLog and argumentation. Further, the connections pave the way towards novel forms of argumentative explanations for ProbLog's outputs.

Recently, ABA Learning has been proposed as a form of symbolic machine learning for drawing Assumption-Based Argumentation frameworks from background knowledge and positive and negative examples. We propose a novel method for implementing ABA Learning using Answer Set Programming as a way to help guide Rote Learning and generalisation in ABA Learning.