Broad Explainable Artificial Intelligence moves away from interpreting individual decisions based on a single datum and aims to provide integrated explanations from multiple machine learning algorithms into a coherent explanation of an agent's behaviour that is aligned to the communication needs of the explainee. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, we propose, provide a potential backbone for the cognitive model required for the development of Broad-XAI. RL represents a suite of approaches that have had increasing success in solving a range of sequential decision-making problems. However, these algorithms all operate as black-box problem solvers, where they obfuscate their decision-making policy through a complex array of values and functions. EXplainable RL (XRL) is relatively recent field of research that aims to develop techniques to extract concepts from the agent's: perception of the environment; intrinsic/extrinsic motivations/beliefs; Q-values, goals and objectives. This paper aims to introduce a conceptual framework, called the Causal XRL Framework (CXF), that unifies the current XRL research and uses RL as a backbone to the development of Broad-XAI. Additionally, we recognise that RL methods have the ability to incorporate a range of technologies to allow agents to adapt to their environment. CXF is designed for the incorporation of many standard RL extensions and integrated with external ontologies and communication facilities so that the agent can answer questions that explain outcomes and justify its decisions.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) lays a new paradigm for the concept of Industry 4.0 and paves an insight for new industrial era. Nowadays smart machines and smart factories use machine learning/deep learning based models for incurring intelligence. However, storing and communicating the data to the cloud and end device leads to issues in preserving privacy. In order to address this issue, federated learning (FL) technology is implemented in IIoT by the researchers nowadays to provide safe, accurate, robust and unbiased models. Integrating FL in IIoT ensures that no local sensitive data is exchanged, as the distribution of learning models over the edge devices has become more common with FL. Therefore, only the encrypted notifications and parameters are communicated to the central server. In this paper, we provide a thorough overview on integrating FL with IIoT in terms of privacy, resource and data management. The survey starts by articulating IIoT characteristics and fundamentals of distributive and FL. The motivation behind integrating IIoT and FL for achieving data privacy preservation and on-device learning are summarized. Then we discuss the potential of using machine learning, deep learning and blockchain techniques for FL in secure IIoT. Further we analyze and summarize the ways to handle the heterogeneous and huge data. Comprehensive background on data and resource management are then presented, followed by applications of IIoT with FL in healthcare and automobile industry. Finally, we shed light on challenges, some possible solutions and potential directions for future research.

Interpretable Machine Learning (IML) has become increasingly important in many applications, such as autonomous cars and medical diagnosis, where explanations are preferred to help people better understand how machine learning systems work and further enhance their trust towards systems. Particularly in robotics, explanations from IML are significantly helpful in providing reasons for those adverse and inscrutable actions, which could impair the safety and profit of the public. However, due to the diversified scenarios and subjective nature of explanations, we rarely have the ground truth for benchmark evaluation in IML on the quality of generated explanations. Having a sense of explanation quality not only matters for quantifying system boundaries, but also helps to realize the true benefits to human users in real-world applications. To benchmark evaluation in IML, in this paper, we rigorously define the problem of evaluating explanations, and systematically review the existing efforts. Specifically, we summarize three general aspects of explanation (i.e., predictability, fidelity and persuasibility) with formal definitions, and respectively review the representative methodologies for each of them under different tasks. Further, a unified evaluation framework is designed according to the hierarchical needs from developers and end-users, which could be easily adopted for different scenarios in practice. In the end, open problems are discussed, and several limitations of current evaluation techniques are raised for future explorations.

Multi-task learning (MTL) can improve performance on a task by sharing representations with one or more related auxiliary-tasks. Usually, MTL-networks are trained on a composite loss function formed by a constant weighted combination of the separate task losses. In practice, constant loss weights lead to poor results for two reasons: (i) the relevance of the auxiliary tasks can gradually drift throughout the learning process; (ii) for mini-batch based optimisation, the optimal task weights vary significantly from one update to the next depending on mini-batch sample composition. We introduce HydaLearn, an intelligent weighting algorithm that connects main-task gain to the individual task gradients, in order to inform dynamic loss weighting at the mini-batch level, addressing i and ii. Using HydaLearn, we report performance increases on synthetic data, as well as on two supervised learning domains.

We investigate learning of the online local update rules for neural activations (bodies) and weights (synapses) from scratch. We represent the states of each weight and activation by small vectors, and parameterize their updates using (meta-) neural networks. Different neuron types are represented by different embedding vectors which allows the same two functions to be used for all neurons. Instead of training directly for the objective using evolution or long term back-propagation, as is commonly done in similar systems, we motivate and study a different objective: That of remembering past snippets of experience. We explain how this objective relates to standard back-propagation training and other forms of learning. We train for this objective using short term back-propagation and analyze the performance as a function of both the different network types and the difficulty of the problem. We find that this analysis gives interesting insights onto what constitutes a learning rule. We also discuss how such system could form a natural substrate for addressing topics such as episodic memories, meta-learning and auxiliary objectives.