Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly match or surpass human experts in biomedical signal interpretation. However, their effective integration into clinical practice requires more than high predictive accuracy. Clinicians must discern \textit{when} and \textit{why} to trust algorithmic recommendations. This work presents an application-grounded user study with eight professional sleep medicine practitioners, who score nocturnal arousal events in polysomnographic data under three conditions: (i) manual scoring, (ii) black-box (BB) AI assistance, and (iii) transparent white-box (WB) AI assistance. Assistance is provided either from the \textit{start} of scoring or as a post-hoc quality-control (\textit{QC}) review. We systematically evaluate how the type and timing of assistance influence event-level and clinically most relevant count-based performance, time requirements, and user experience. When evaluated against the clinical standard used to train the AI, both AI and human-AI teams significantly outperform unaided experts, with collaboration also reducing inter-rater variability. Notably, transparent AI assistance applied as a targeted QC step yields median event-level performance improvements of approximately 30\% over black-box assistance, and QC timing further enhances count-based outcomes. While WB and QC approaches increase the time required for scoring, start-time assistance is faster and preferred by most participants. Participants overwhelmingly favor transparency, with seven out of eight expressing willingness to adopt the system with minor or no modifications. In summary, strategically timed transparent AI assistance effectively balances accuracy and clinical efficiency, providing a promising pathway toward trustworthy AI integration and user acceptance in clinical workflows.

The presence of interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) in electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings is a critical biomarker of epilepsy. Even trained neurologists find detecting IEDs difficult, leading many practitioners to turn to machine learning for help. While existing machine learning algorithms can achieve strong accuracy on this task, most models are uninterpretable and cannot justify their conclusions. Absent the ability to understand model reasoning, doctors cannot leverage their expertise to identify incorrect model predictions and intervene accordingly. To improve the human-model interaction, we introduce ProtoEEG-kNN, an inherently interpretable model that follows a simple case-based reasoning process. ProtoEEG-kNN reasons by comparing an EEG to similar EEGs from the training set and visually demonstrates its reasoning both in terms of IED morphology (shape) and spatial distribution (location). We show that ProtoEEG-kNN can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in IED detection while providing explanations that experts prefer over existing approaches.

Ecological monitoring is increasingly automated by vision models, yet opaque predictions limit trust and field adoption. We present an inpainting-guided, perturbation-based explanation technique that produces photorealistic, mask-localized edits that preserve scene context. Unlike masking or blurring, these edits stay in-distribution and reveal which fine-grained morphological cues drive predictions in tasks such as species recognition and trait attribution. We demonstrate the approach on a YOLOv9 detector fine-tuned for harbor seal detection in Glacier Bay drone imagery, using Segment-Anything-Model-refined masks to support two interventions: (i) object removal/replacement (e.g., replacing seals with plausible ice/water or boats) and (ii) background replacement with original animals composited onto new scenes. Explanations are assessed by re-scoring perturbed images (flip rate, confidence drop) and by expert review for ecological plausibility and interpretability. The resulting explanations localize diagnostic structures, avoid deletion artifacts common to traditional perturbations, and yield domain-relevant insights that support expert validation and more trustworthy deployment of AI in ecology.

Knowledge distillation is a promising approach to transfer capabilities from complex teacher models to smaller, resource-efficient student models that can be deployed easily, particularly in task-aware scenarios. However, existing methods of task-aware distillation typically require substantial quantities of data which may be unavailable or expensive to obtain in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing a novel strategy called Counterfactual-explanation-infused Distillation CoD for few-shot task-aware knowledge distillation by systematically infusing counterfactual explanations. Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) refer to inputs that can flip the output prediction of the teacher model with minimum perturbation. Our strategy CoD leverages these CFEs to precisely map the teacher's decision boundary with significantly fewer samples. We provide theoretical guarantees for motivating the role of CFEs in distillation, from both statistical and geometric perspectives. We mathematically show that CFEs can improve parameter estimation by providing more informative examples near the teacher's decision boundary. We also derive geometric insights on how CFEs effectively act as knowledge probes, helping the students mimic the teacher's decision boundaries more effectively than standard data. We perform experiments across various datasets and LLMs to show that CoD outperforms standard distillation approaches in few-shot regimes (as low as 8-512 samples). Notably, CoD only uses half of the original samples used by the baselines, paired with their corresponding CFEs and still improves performance.

Counterfactual explanations (CFXs) provide human-understandable justifications for model predictions, enabling actionable recourse and enhancing interpretability. To be reliable, CFXs must avoid regions of high predictive uncertainty, where explanations may be misleading or inapplicable. However, existing methods often neglect uncertainty or lack principled mechanisms for incorporating it with formal guarantees. We propose CONFEX, a novel method for generating uncertainty-aware counterfactual explanations using Conformal Prediction (CP) and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP). CONFEX explanations are designed to provide local coverage guarantees, addressing the issue that CFX generation violates exchangeability. To do so, we develop a novel localised CP procedure that enjoys an efficient MILP encoding by leveraging an offline tree-based partitioning of the input space. This way, CONFEX generates CFXs with rigorous guarantees on both predictive uncertainty and optimality. We evaluate CONFEX against state-of-the-art methods across diverse benchmarks and metrics, demonstrating that our uncertainty-aware approach yields robust and plausible explanations.

Precedential constraint is one foundation of case-based reasoning in AI and Law. It generally assumes that the underlying set of precedents must be consistent. To relax this assumption, a generalized notion of the reason model has been introduced. While several argumentative explanation approaches exist for reasoning with precedents based on the traditional consistent reason model, there has been no corresponding argumentative explanation method developed for this generalized reasoning framework accommodating inconsistent precedents. To address this question, this paper examines an extension of the derivation state argumentation framework (DSA-framework) to explain the reasoning according to the generalized notion of the reason model.

The growing integration of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models into high-stakes domains such as healthcare and scientific research calls for models that are not only accurate but also interpretable. Among the existing explainable methods, counterfactual explanations offer interpretability by identifying minimal changes to inputs that would alter a model's prediction, thus providing deeper insights. However, current counterfactual generation methods suffer from critical limitations, including gradient vanishing, discontinuous latent spaces, and an overreliance on the alignment between learned and true decision boundaries. To overcome these limitations, we propose LeapFactual, a novel counterfactual explanation algorithm based on conditional flow matching. LeapFactual generates reliable and informative counterfactuals, even when true and learned decision boundaries diverge. Following a model-agnostic approach, LeapFactual is not limited to models with differentiable loss functions. It can even handle human-in-the-loop systems, expanding the scope of counterfactual explanations to domains that require the participation of human annotators, such as citizen science. We provide extensive experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets showing that LeapFactual generates accurate and in-distribution counterfactual explanations that offer actionable insights. We observe, for instance, that our reliable counterfactual samples with labels aligning to ground truth can be beneficially used as new training data to enhance the model. The proposed method is broadly applicable and enhances both scientific knowledge discovery and non-expert interpretability.

Modelling qualitative uncertainty in formal argumentation is essential both for practical applications and theoretical understanding. Yet, most of the existing works focus on \textit{abstract} models for arguing with uncertainty. Following a recent trend in the literature, we tackle the open question of studying plausible instantiations of these abstract models. To do so, we ground the uncertainty of arguments in their components, structured within rules and premises. Our main technical contributions are: i) the introduction of a notion of expressivity that can handle abstract and structured formalisms, and ii) the presentation of both negative and positive expressivity results, comparing the expressivity of abstract and structured models of argumentation with uncertainty. These results affect incomplete abstract argumentation frameworks, and their extension with dependencies, on the abstract side, and ASPIC+, on the structured side.

With the growing use of large language models and conversational interfaces in human-robot interaction, robots' ability to answer user questions is more important than ever. We therefore introduce a dataset of 1,893 user questions for household robots, collected from 100 participants and organized into 12 categories and 70 subcategories. Most work in explainable robotics focuses on why-questions. In contrast, our dataset provides a wide variety of questions, from questions about simple execution details to questions about how the robot would act in hypothetical scenarios -- thus giving roboticists valuable insights into what questions their robot needs to be able to answer. To collect the dataset, we created 15 video stimuli and 7 text stimuli, depicting robots performing varied household tasks. We then asked participants on Prolific what questions they would want to ask the robot in each portrayed situation. In the final dataset, the most frequent categories are questions about task execution details (22.5%), the robot's capabilities (12.7%), and performance assessments (11.3%). Although questions about how robots would handle potentially difficult scenarios and ensure correct behavior are less frequent, users rank them as the most important for robots to be able to answer. Moreover, we find that users who identify as novices in robotics ask different questions than more experienced users. Novices are more likely to inquire about simple facts, such as what the robot did or the current state of the environment. As robots enter environments shared with humans and language becomes central to giving instructions and interaction, this dataset provides a valuable foundation for (i) identifying the information robots need to log and expose to conversational interfaces, (ii) benchmarking question-answering modules, and (iii) designing explanation strategies that align with user expectations.

Sleep disorders have a major impact on patients' health and quality of life, but their diagnosis remains complex due to the diversity of symptoms. Today, technological advances, combined with medical data analysis, are opening new perspectives for a better understanding of these disorders. In particular, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to make AI model decisions understandable and interpretable for users. In this study, we propose a clustering-based method to group patients according to different sleep disorder profiles. By integrating an explainable approach, we identify the key factors influencing these pathologies. An experiment on anonymized real data illustrates the effectiveness and relevance of our approach.