In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of alterfactual explanations for black box image classifiers. Traditional explanation mechanisms from the field of Counterfactual Thinking are a widely-used paradigm for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), as they follow a natural way of reasoning that humans are familiar with. However, most common approaches from this field are based on communicating information about features or characteristics that are especially important for an AI's decision. However, to fully understand a decision, not only knowledge about relevant features is needed, but the awareness of irrelevant information also highly contributes to the creation of a user's mental model of an AI system. To this end, a novel approach for explaining AI systems called alterfactual explanations was recently proposed on a conceptual level. It is based on showing an alternative reality where irrelevant features of an AI's input are altered. By doing so, the user directly sees which input data characteristics can change arbitrarily without influencing the AI's decision. In this paper, we show for the first time that it is possible to apply this idea to black box models based on neural networks. To this end, we present a GAN-based approach to generate these alterfactual explanations for binary image classifiers. Further, we present a user study that gives interesting insights on how alterfactual explanations can complement counterfactual explanations.

Speech is a natural interface for humans to interact with robots. Yet, aligning a robot's voice to its appearance is challenging due to the rich vocabulary of both modalities. Previous research has explored a few labels to describe robots and tested them on a limited number of robots and existing voices. Here, we develop a robot-voice creation tool followed by large-scale behavioral human experiments (N=2,505). First, participants collectively tune robotic voices to match 175 robot images using an adaptive human-in-the-loop pipeline. Then, participants describe their impression of the robot or their matched voice using another human-in-the-loop paradigm for open-ended labeling. The elicited taxonomy is then used to rate robot attributes and to predict the best voice for an unseen robot. We offer a web interface to aid engineers in customizing robot voices, demonstrating the synergy between cognitive science and machine learning for engineering tools.

Companies' adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming an essential element of business success. However, using AI poses new requirements for companies and their employees, including transparency and comprehensibility of AI systems. The field of Explainable AI (XAI) aims to address these issues. Yet, the current research primarily consists of laboratory studies, and there is a need to improve the applicability of the findings to real-world situations. Therefore, this project report paper provides insights into employees' needs and attitudes towards (X)AI. For this, we investigate employees' perspectives on (X)AI. Our findings suggest that AI and XAI are well-known terms perceived as important for employees. This recognition is a critical first step for XAI to potentially drive successful usage of AI by providing comprehensible insights into AI technologies. In a lessons-learned section, we discuss the open questions identified and suggest future research directions to develop human-centered XAI designs for companies. By providing insights into employees' needs and attitudes towards (X)AI, our project report contributes to the development of XAI solutions that meet the requirements of companies and their employees, ultimately driving the successful adoption of AI technologies in the business context.

Systems used here must provide comprehensible and transparent information about their decisions. Especially for patients, who are mostly no healthcare experts, comprehensible information is extremely important to understand diagnoses and treatment options (e.g., [2, 3]). To support more transparent Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, approaches for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) are an ongoing topic of high interest [4]. Especially in the field of computer vision, a common strategy to achieve this kind of transparency is the creation of saliency maps that highlight areas in the input that were important for the decision of the AI system. The problem with those explanation strategies is, that they require the user of the XAI system to perform an additional thought process: Having the information what areas were important for a certain decision inevitably leads to the question why these areas were of importance. Especially in scenarios where relevant differences in the input data are originating from textural information rather than spatial information of certain objects, it becomes clear that the raw information about where important areas are is not always sufficient. One XAI approach that goes another way to avoid the aforementioned problems, are Counterfactual Explanations. Counterfactual explanations try to help to understand why the actual decision was made instead of another one, by creating a slightly modified version of the input which results in another decision of the AI [5, 6]. Creating such a slightly modified input that changes the model's prediction is by no means a trivial task.

With advances in reinforcement learning (RL), agents are now being developed in high-stakes application domains such as healthcare and transportation. Explaining the behavior of these agents is challenging, as the environments in which they act have large state spaces, and their decision-making can be affected by delayed rewards, making it difficult to analyze their behavior. To address this problem, several approaches have been developed. Some approaches attempt to convey the $\textit{global}$ behavior of the agent, describing the actions it takes in different states. Other approaches devised $\textit{local}$ explanations which provide information regarding the agent's decision-making in a particular state. In this paper, we combine global and local explanation methods, and evaluate their joint and separate contributions, providing (to the best of our knowledge) the first user study of combined local and global explanations for RL agents. Specifically, we augment strategy summaries that extract important trajectories of states from simulations of the agent with saliency maps which show what information the agent attends to. Our results show that the choice of what states to include in the summary (global information) strongly affects people's understanding of agents: participants shown summaries that included important states significantly outperformed participants who were presented with agent behavior in a randomly set of chosen world-states. We find mixed results with respect to augmenting demonstrations with saliency maps (local information), as the addition of saliency maps did not significantly improve performance in most cases. However, we do find some evidence that saliency maps can help users better understand what information the agent relies on in its decision making, suggesting avenues for future work that can further improve explanations of RL agents.