Extracting implicit knowledge and logical reasoning abilities from large language models (LLMs) has consistently been a significant challenge. The advancement of multi-agent systems has further en-hanced the capabilities of LLMs. Inspired by the structure of multi-polar neurons (MNs), we propose the XAgents framework, an in-terpretable multi-agent cooperative framework based on the IF-THEN rule-based system. The IF-Parts of the rules are responsible for logical reasoning and domain membership calculation, while the THEN-Parts are comprised of domain expert agents that generate domain-specific contents. Following the calculation of the member-ship, XAgetns transmits the task to the disparate domain rules, which subsequently generate the various responses. These re-sponses are analogous to the answers provided by different experts to the same question. The final response is reached at by eliminat-ing the hallucinations and erroneous knowledge of the LLM through membership computation and semantic adversarial genera-tion of the various domain rules. The incorporation of rule-based interpretability serves to bolster user confidence in the XAgents framework. We evaluate the efficacy of XAgents through a com-parative analysis with the latest AutoAgents, in which XAgents demonstrated superior performance across three distinct datasets. We perform post-hoc interpretable studies with SHAP algorithm and case studies, proving the interpretability of XAgent in terms of input-output feature correlation and rule-based semantics.

Most Deontic Logics take obligation as primitive and leave the others as derived from obligations. On the other hand, normative reasoning/legal theory identifies two different notions of permission: Strong Permission and Weak Permission. While the definitions of the types of permission vary, and other notions of permission have been proposed (for a discussion on the topic, see Hansson (2013)), often strong permission is taken as a derogation to a prohibition or the obligation to the contrary, and we have a weak permission when we fail to obtain the obligation of the contrary. Another way to look at the issue is whether there are norms that explicitly permit something. If there are and the norms are effective, then we obtain an explicit (strong) permission.

We introduce a method to measure the alignment between public will and language model (LM) behavior that can be applied to fine-tuning, online oversight, and pre-release safety checks. Our `chain of alignment' (CoA) approach produces a rule based reward (RBR) by creating model behavior $\textit{rules}$ aligned to normative $\textit{objectives}$ aligned to $\textit{public will}$. This factoring enables a nonexpert public to directly specify their will through the normative objectives, while expert intelligence is used to figure out rules entailing model behavior that best achieves those objectives. We validate our approach by applying it across three different domains of LM prompts related to mental health. We demonstrate a public input process built on collective dialogues and bridging-based ranking that reliably produces normative objectives supported by at least $96\% \pm 2\%$ of the US public. We then show that rules developed by mental health experts to achieve those objectives enable a RBR that evaluates an LM response's alignment with the objectives similarly to human experts (Pearson's $r=0.841$, $AUC=0.964$). By measuring alignment with objectives that have near unanimous public support, these CoA RBRs provide an approximate measure of alignment between LM behavior and public will.

Formulating an effective constraint model of a parameterised problem class is crucial to the efficiency with which instances of the class can subsequently be solved. It is difficult to know beforehand which of a set of candidate models will perform best in practice. This paper presents a system that employs graph rewriting to reformulate an input model for improved performance automatically. By situating our work in the Essence abstract constraint specification language, we can use the structure in its high level variable types to trigger rewrites directly. We implement our system via rewrite rules expressed in the Graph Programs 2 language, applied to the abstract syntax tree of an input specification. We show how to automatically translate the solution of the reformulated problem into a solution of the original problem for verification and presentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system with a detailed case study.

Recently, research based on pre-trained models has demonstrated outstanding performance in violence surveillance tasks. However, most of them were black-box systems which faced challenges regarding explainability during training and inference processes. An important question is how to incorporate explicit knowledge into these implicit models, thereby designing expertdriven and interpretable violence surveillance systems. This paper proposes a new paradigm for weakly supervised violence monitoring (WSVM) called Rule base Violence Monitoring (RuleVM). The proposed RuleVM uses a dual-branch structure with different designs for images and text. One of the branches is called the implicit branch, which uses only visual features for coarse-grained binary classification. In this branch, image feature extraction is divided into two channels: one responsible for extracting scene frames and the other focusing on extracting actions. The other branch is called the explicit branch, which utilizes language-image alignment to perform fine-grained classification. For the language channel design in the explicit branch, the proposed RuleVM uses the state-of-the-art YOLOWorld model to detect objects in video frames, and association rules are identified through data mining methods as descriptions of the video. Leveraging the dual-branch architecture, RuleVM achieves interpretable coarse-grained and fine-grained violence surveillance. Extensive experiments were conducted on two commonly used benchmarks, and the results show that RuleVM achieved the best performance in both coarse-grained and finegrained monitoring, significantly outperforming existing state-ofthe-art methods. Moreover, interpretability experiments uncovered some interesting rules, such as the observation that as the number of people increases, the risk level of violent behavior also rises.

Classroom dialogue plays a crucial role in fostering student engagement and deeper learning. However, analysing dialogue sequences has traditionally relied on either theoretical frameworks or empirical descriptions of practice, with limited integration between the two. This study addresses this gap by developing a comprehensive rule base of dialogue sequences and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent that combines expert-informed rule-based systems with a large language model (LLM). The agent applies expert knowledge while adapting to the complexities of natural language, enabling accurate and flexible categorisation of classroom dialogue sequences. By synthesising findings from over 30 studies, we established a comprehensive framework for dialogue analysis. The agent was validated against human expert coding, achieving high levels of precision and reliability. The results demonstrate that the agent provides theory-grounded and adaptive functions, tremendously enhancing the efficiency and scalability of classroom dialogue analysis, offering significant potential in improving classroom teaching practices and supporting teacher professional development.

Machine learning models deployed in sensitive areas such as healthcare must be interpretable to ensure accountability and fairness. However, learning such rule lists presents significant challenges. Existing methods based on combinatorial optimization require feature pre-discretization and impose restrictions on rule size. Neuro-symbolic methods use more scalable continuous optimization yet place similar pre-discretization constraints and suffer from unstable optimization. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the rule list learning problem that converges to a strict rule list through temperature annealing. Machine learning models are increasingly used in high-stakes applications such as healthcare (Deo, 2015), credit risk evaluation (Bhatore et al., 2020), and criminal justice (Lakkaraju & Rudin, 2017), where it is vital that each decision is fair and reasonable. Proxy measures such as Shapley values can give the illusion of interpretability, but are highly problematic as they can not faithfully represent a non-additive models decision process (Gosiewska & Biecek, 2019). Instead, Rudin (2019) argues that it is crucial to use inherently interpretable models, to create systems with human supervision in the loop (Kleinberg et al., 2018). For particularly sensitive domains such as stroke prediction or recidivism, so called Rule Lists are a popular choice (Letham et al., 2015) due to their fully transparent decision making. A rule list predicts based on nested "if-then-else" statements and naturally aligns with the human-decision making process. Each rule is active if its conditions are met, e.g. " if Thalassemia = normal Resting bps < 151 ", and carries a respective prediction, i.e. " then P ( Disease) = 10% ".

Causal inference and model interpretability are gaining increasing attention, particularly in the biomedical domain. Despite recent advance, decorrelating features in nonlinear environments with human-interpretable representations remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a novel method called causal rule generation with target trial emulation framework (CRTRE), which applies randomize trial design principles to estimate the causal effect of association rules. We then incorporate such association rules for the downstream applications such as prediction of disease onsets. Extensive experiments on six healthcare datasets, including synthetic data, real-world disease collections, and MIMIC-III/IV, demonstrate the model's superior performance. Specifically, our method achieved a $\beta$ error of 0.907, outperforming DWR (1.024) and SVM (1.141). On real-world datasets, our model achieved accuracies of 0.789, 0.920, and 0.300 for Esophageal Cancer, Heart Disease, and Cauda Equina Syndrome prediction task, respectively, consistently surpassing baseline models. On the ICD code prediction tasks, it achieved AUC Macro scores of 92.8 on MIMIC-III and 96.7 on MIMIC-IV, outperforming the state-of-the-art models KEPT and MSMN. Expert evaluations further validate the model's effectiveness, causality, and interpretability.

Dose prediction is an area of ongoing research that facilitates radiotherapy planning. Most commercial models utilise imaging data and intense computing resources. This study aimed to predict the dose-volume of rectum and bladder from volumes of target, at-risk structure organs and their overlap regions using machine learning. Dose-volume information of 94 patients with prostate cancer planned for 6000cGy in 20 fractions was exported from the treatment planning system as text files and mined to create a training dataset. Several statistical modelling, machine learning methods, and a new fuzzy rule-based prediction (FRBP) model were explored and validated on an independent dataset of 39 patients. The median absolute error was 2.0%-3.7% for bladder and 1.7-2.4% for rectum in the 4000-6420cGy range. For 5300cGy, 5600cGy and 6000cGy, the median difference was less than 2.5% for rectum and 3.8% for bladder. The FRBP model produced errors of 1.2%, 1.3%, 0.9% and 1.6%, 1.2%, 0.1% for the rectum and bladder respectively at these dose levels. These findings indicate feasibility of obtaining accurate predictions of the clinically important dose-volume parameters for rectum and bladder using just the volumes of these structures.

With the rapid advancement of neural language models, the deployment of over-parameterized models has surged, increasing the need for interpretable explanations comprehensible to human inspectors. Existing post-hoc interpretability methods, which often focus on unigram features of single input textual instances, fail to capture the models' decision-making process fully. Additionally, many methods do not differentiate between decisions based on spurious correlations and those based on a holistic understanding of the input. Our paper introduces DISCO, a novel method for discovering global, rule-based explanations by identifying causal n-gram associations with model predictions. This method employs a scalable sequence mining technique to extract relevant text spans from training data, associate them with model predictions, and conduct causality checks to distill robust rules that elucidate model behavior. These rules expose potential overfitting and provide insights into misleading feature combinations. We validate DISCO through extensive testing, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods in offering comprehensive insights into complex model behaviors. Our approach successfully identifies all shortcuts manually introduced into the training data (100% detection rate on the MultiRC dataset), resulting in an 18.8% regression in model performance -- a capability unmatched by any other method. Furthermore, DISCO supports interactive explanations, enabling human inspectors to distinguish spurious causes in the rule-based output. This alleviates the burden of abundant instance-wise explanations and helps assess the model's risk when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) data.