Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is concerned with producing explanations indicating the inner workings of models. For a Rashomon set of similarly performing models, explanations provide a way of disambiguating the behavior of individual models, helping select models for deployment. However explanations themselves can vary depending on the explainer used, and need to be evaluated. In the paper "Evaluating Model Explanations without Ground Truth", we proposed three principles of explanation evaluation and a new method "AXE" to evaluate the quality of feature-importance explanations. We go on to illustrate how evaluation metrics that rely on comparing model explanations against ideal ground truth explanations obscure behavioral differences within a Rashomon set. Explanation evaluation aligned with our proposed principles would highlight these differences instead, helping select models from the Rashomon set. The selection of alternate models from the Rashomon set can maintain identical predictions but mislead explainers into generating false explanations, and mislead evaluation methods into considering the false explanations to be of high quality. AXE, our proposed explanation evaluation method, can detect this adversarial fairwashing of explanations with a 100% success rate. Unlike prior explanation evaluation strategies such as those based on model sensitivity or ground truth comparison, AXE can determine when protected attributes are used to make predictions.

Instance-level explanation of graph neural networks (GNNs) is a well-studied area. These explainers, however, only explain an instance (e.g., a graph) and fail to uncover the combinatorial reasoning learned by a GNN from the training data towards making its predictions. In this work, we introduce GraphTrail, the first end-to-end, global, post-hoc GNN explainer that translates the functioning of a black-box GNN model to a boolean formula over the (sub)graph level concepts without relying on local explainers. GraphTrail is unique in automatically mining the discriminative subgraph-level concepts using Shapley values. Subsequently, the GNN predictions are mapped to a human-interpretable boolean formula over these concepts through symbolic regression. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and GNN architectures demonstrate significant improvement over existing global explainers in mapping GNN predictions to faithful logical formulae. The robust and accurate performance of GraphTrail makes it invaluable for improving GNNs and facilitates adoption in domains with strict transparency requirements.

Multimodal classifiers function as opaque black box models. While several techniques exist to interpret their predictions, very few of them are as intuitive and accessible as natural language explanations (NLEs). To build trust, such explanations must faithfully capture the classifier's internal decision making behavior, a property known as faithfulness. In this paper, we propose CAuSE (Causal Abstraction under Simulated Explanations), a novel framework to generate faithful NLEs for any pretrained multimodal classifier. We demonstrate that CAuSE generalizes across datasets and models through extensive empirical evaluations. Theoretically, we show that CAuSE, trained via interchange intervention, forms a causal abstraction of the underlying classifier. We further validate this through a redesigned metric for measuring causal faithfulness in multimodal settings. CAuSE surpasses other methods on this metric, with qualitative analysis reinforcing its advantages. We perform detailed error analysis to pinpoint the failure cases of CAuSE. For replicability, we make the codes available at https://github.com/newcodevelop/CAuSE

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become indispensable in critical domains such as drug discovery, social network analysis, and recommendation systems, yet their black-box nature hinders deployment in scenarios requiring transparency and accountability. While Shapley value-based methods offer mathematically principled explanations by quantifying each component's contribution to predictions, computing exact values requires evaluating $2^n$ coalitions (or aggregating over $n!$ permutations), which is intractable for real-world graphs. Existing approximation strategies sacrifice either fidelity or efficiency, limiting their practical utility. We introduce QGShap, a quantum computing approach that leverages amplitude amplification to achieve quadratic speedups in coalition evaluation while maintaining exact Shapley computation. Unlike classical sampling or surrogate methods, our approach provides fully faithful explanations without approximation trade-offs for tractable graph sizes. We conduct empirical evaluations on synthetic graph datasets, demonstrating that QGShap achieves consistently high fidelity and explanation accuracy, matching or exceeding the performance of classical methods across all evaluation metrics. These results collectively demonstrate that QGShap not only preserves exact Shapley faithfulness but also delivers interpretable, stable, and structurally consistent explanations that align with the underlying graph reasoning of GNNs. The implementation of QGShap is available at https://github.com/smlab-niser/qgshap.

Inference queries have been routinely issued to graph machine learning models such as graph neural networks (GNNs) for various network analytical tasks. Nevertheless, GNN outputs are often hard to interpret comprehensively. Existing methods typically conform to individual pre-defined explainability measures (such as fidelity), which often leads to biased, ``one-side'' interpretations. This paper introduces skyline explanation, a new paradigm that interprets GNN outputs by simultaneously optimizing multiple explainability measures of users' interests. (1) We propose skyline explanations as a Pareto set of explanatory subgraphs that dominate others over multiple explanatory measures. We formulate skyline explanation as a multi-criteria optimization problem, and establish its hardness results. (2) We design efficient algorithms with an onion-peeling approach, which strategically prioritizes nodes and removes unpromising edges to incrementally assemble skyline explanations. (3) We also develop an algorithm to diversify the skyline explanations to enrich the comprehensive interpretation. (4) We introduce efficient parallel algorithms with load-balancing strategies to scale skyline explanation for large-scale GNN-based inference. Using real-world and synthetic graphs, we experimentally verify our algorithms' effectiveness and scalability.

O, is a hybridization of these approaches that regularizes a model for explanation quality at training time.