Effective communication is essential in collaborative tasks, so AI-equipped robots working alongside humans need to be able to explain their behaviour in order to cooperate effectively and earn trust. We analyse and classify communications among human participants collaborating to complete a simulated emergency response task. The analysis identifies messages that relate to various kinds of interactive explanations identified in the explainable AI literature. This allows us to understand what type of explanations humans expect from their teammates in such settings, and thus where AI-equipped robots most need explanation capabilities. We find that most explanation-related messages seek clarification in the decisions or actions taken. We also confirm that messages have an impact on the performance of our simulated task.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are considered inherently interpretable because they first predict a set of human-defined concepts before using these concepts to predict the output of a downstream task. For inherent interpretability to be fully realised, and ensure trust in a model's output, we need to guarantee concepts are predicted based on semantically mapped input features. For example, one might expect the pixels representing a broken bone in an image to be used for the prediction of a fracture. However, current literature indicates this is not the case, as concept predictions are often mapped to irrelevant input features. We hypothesise that this occurs when concept annotations are inaccurate or how input features should relate to concepts is unclear. In general, the effect of dataset labelling on concept representations in CBMs remains an understudied area. Therefore, in this paper, we examine how CBMs learn concepts from datasets with fine-grained concept annotations. We demonstrate that CBMs can learn concept representations with semantic mapping to input features by removing problematic concept correlations, such as two concepts always appearing together. To support our evaluation, we introduce a new synthetic image dataset based on a playing cards domain, which we hope will serve as a benchmark for future CBM research. For validation, we provide empirical evidence on a real-world dataset of chest X-rays, to demonstrate semantically meaningful concepts can be learned in real-world applications.

Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agendas aiming to influence voter behaviour. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets of politicians from three European countries and explore the virality of their tweets. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. By utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models, we performed sentiment analysis on hundreds of thousands of tweets collected from members of parliament in Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the differences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians' negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting differences between political parties as well as between politicians and the general population.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) first map raw input(s) to a vector of human-defined concepts, before using this vector to predict a final classification. We might therefore expect CBMs capable of predicting concepts based on distinct regions of an input. In doing so, this would support human interpretation when generating explanations of the model's outputs to visualise input features corresponding to concepts. The contribution of this paper is threefold: Firstly, we expand on existing literature by looking at relevance both from the input to the concept vector, confirming that relevance is distributed among the input features, and from the concept vector to the final classification where, for the most part, the final classification is made using concepts predicted as present. Secondly, we report a quantitative evaluation to measure the distance between the maximum input feature relevance and the ground truth location; we perform this with the techniques, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), Integrated Gradients (IG) and a baseline gradient approach, finding LRP has a lower average distance than IG. Thirdly, we propose using the proportion of relevance as a measurement for explaining concept importance.

Data augmentation techniques are widely used for enhancing the performance of machine learning models by tackling class imbalance issues and data sparsity. State-of-the-art generative language models have been shown to provide significant gains across different NLP tasks. However, their applicability to data augmentation for text classification tasks in few-shot settings have not been fully explored, especially for specialised domains. In this paper, we leverage GPT-2 (Radford A et al, 2019) for generating artificial training instances in order to improve classification performance. Our aim is to analyse the impact the selection process of seed training examples have over the quality of GPT-generated samples and consequently the classifier performance. We perform experiments with several seed selection strategies that, among others, exploit class hierarchical structures and domain expert selection. Our results show that fine-tuning GPT-2 in a handful of label instances leads to consistent classification improvements and outperform competitive baselines. Finally, we show that guiding this process through domain expert selection can lead to further improvements, which opens up interesting research avenues for combining generative models and active learning.

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation and member institutions. The author has provided no source to generate PDF, and no PDF.

In this paper, we present an approach to Complex Event Processing (CEP) that is based on DeepProbLog. This approach has the following objectives: (i) allowing the use of subsymbolic data as an input, (ii) retaining the flexibility and modularity on the definitions of complex event rules, (iii) allowing the system to be trained in an end-to-end manner and (iv) being robust against noisily labelled data. Our approach makes use of DeepProbLog to create a neuro-symbolic architecture that combines a neural network to process the subsymbolic data with a probabilistic logic layer to allow the user to define the rules for the complex events. We demonstrate that our approach is capable of detecting complex events from an audio stream. We also demonstrate that our approach is capable of training even with a dataset that has a moderate proportion of noisy data.

Increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) systems into scientific workflows will result in an increasing technical debt as the distance between the data scientists and engineers who develop AI system components and scientists, researchers and other users grows. This could quickly become problematic, particularly where guidance or regulations change and once-acceptable best practice becomes outdated, or where data sources are later discredited as biased or inaccurate. This paper presents a novel method for deriving a quantifiable metric capable of ranking the overall transparency of the process pipelines used to generate AI systems, such that users, auditors and other stakeholders can gain confidence that they will be able to validate and trust the data sources and contributors in the AI systems that they rely on. The methodology for calculating the metric, and the type of criteria that could be used to make judgements on the visibility of contributions to systems are evaluated through models published at ModelHub and PyTorch Hub, popular archives for sharing science resources, and is found to be helpful in driving consideration of the contributions made to generating AI systems and approaches towards effective documentation and improving transparency in machine learning assets shared within scientific communities.

We present an experimentation platform for coalition situational understanding research that highlights capabilities in explainable artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and integration of symbolic and subsymbolic AI/ML approaches for event processing. The Situational Understanding Explorer (SUE) platform is designed to be lightweight, to easily facilitate experiments and demonstrations, and open. We discuss our requirements to support coalition multi-domain operations with emphasis on asset interoperability and ad hoc human-machine teaming in a dense urban terrain setting. We describe the interface functionality and give examples of SUE applied to coalition situational understanding tasks.

Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Government and Public Sector, Washington, DC, USA, November 13-14, 2020