Natural language explanations (NLEs) are commonly used to provide plausible free-text explanations of a model's reasoning about its predictions. However, recent work has questioned the faithfulness of NLEs, as they may not accurately reflect the model's internal reasoning process regarding its predicted answer. In contrast, highlight explanations -- input fragments identified as critical for the model's predictions -- exhibit measurable faithfulness, which has been incrementally improved through existing research. Building on this foundation, we propose G-Tex, a Graph-Guided Textual Explanation Generation framework designed to enhance the faithfulness of NLEs by leveraging highlight explanations. Specifically, highlight explanations are extracted as highly faithful cues representing the model's reasoning and are subsequently encoded through a graph neural network layer, which explicitly guides the NLE generation process. This alignment ensures that the generated explanations closely reflect the model's underlying reasoning. Experiments on T5 and BART using three reasoning datasets show that G-Tex improves NLE faithfulness by up to 17.59% compared to baseline methods. Additionally, G-Tex generates NLEs with greater semantic and lexical similarity to human-written ones. Human evaluations show that G-Tex can decrease redundant content and enhance the overall quality of NLEs. As our work introduces a novel method for explicitly guiding NLE generation to improve faithfulness, we hope it will serve as a stepping stone for addressing additional criteria for NLE and generated text overall.

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.

As AI models become ever more complex and intertwined in humans' daily lives, greater levels of interactivity of explainable AI (XAI) methods are needed. In this paper, we propose the use of belief change theory as a formal foundation for operators that model the incorporation of new information, i.e. user feedback in interactive XAI, to logical representations of data-driven classifiers. We argue that this type of formalisation provides a framework and a methodology to develop interactive explanations in a principled manner, providing warranted behaviour and favouring transparency and accountability of such interactions. Concretely, we first define a novel, logic-based formalism to represent explanatory information shared between humans and machines. We then consider real world scenarios for interactive XAI, with different prioritisations of new and existing knowledge, where our formalism may be instantiated. Finally, we analyse a core set of belief change postulates, discussing their suitability for our real world settings and pointing to particular challenges that may require the relaxation or reinterpretation of some of the theoretical assumptions underlying existing operators.

Explainable recommender systems (RS) have traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all approach, delivering the same explanation level of detail to each user, without considering their individual needs and goals. Further, explanations in RS have so far been presented mostly in a static and non-interactive manner. To fill these research gaps, we aim in this paper to adopt a user-centered, interactive explanation model that provides explanations with different levels of detail and empowers users to interact with, control, and personalize the explanations based on their needs and preferences. We followed a user-centered approach to design interactive explanations with three levels of detail (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and implemented them in the transparent Recommendation and Interest Modeling Application (RIMA). We conducted a qualitative user study (N=14) to investigate the impact of providing interactive explanations with varying level of details on the users' perception of the explainable RS. Our study showed qualitative evidence that fostering interaction and giving users control in deciding which explanation they would like to see can meet the demands of users with different needs, preferences, and goals, and consequently can have positive effects on different crucial aspects in explainable recommendation, including transparency, trust, satisfaction, and user experience.

As the field of explainable AI (XAI) is maturing, calls for interactive explanations for (the outputs of) AI models are growing, but the state-of-the-art predominantly focuses on static explanations. In this paper, we focus instead on interactive explanations framed as conflict resolution between agents (i.e. AI models and/or humans) by leveraging on computational argumentation. Specifically, we define Argumentative eXchanges (AXs) for dynamically sharing, in multi-agent systems, information harboured in individual agents' quantitative bipolar argumentation frameworks towards resolving conflicts amongst the agents. We then deploy AXs in the XAI setting in which a machine and a human interact about the machine's predictions. We identify and assess several theoretical properties characterising AXs that are suitable for XAI. Finally, we instantiate AXs for XAI by defining various agent behaviours, e.g. capturing counterfactual patterns of reasoning in machines and highlighting the effects of cognitive biases in humans. We show experimentally (in a simulated environment) the comparative advantages of these behaviours in terms of conflict resolution, and show that the strongest argument may not always be the most effective.

Trust is long recognized to be an important factor in Recommender Systems (RS). However, there are different perspectives on trust and different ways to evaluate it. Moreover, a link between trust and transparency is often assumed but not always further investigated. In this paper we first go through different understandings and measurements of trust in the AI and RS community, such as demonstrated and perceived trust. We then review the relationsships between trust and transparency, as well as mental models, and investigate different strategies to achieve transparency in RS such as explanation, exploration and exploranation (i.e., a combination of exploration and explanation). We identify a need for further studies to explore these concepts as well as the relationships between them.

In healthcare, AI systems support clinicians and patients in diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, but many systems' poor explainability remains challenging for practical application. Overcoming this barrier is the goal of explainable AI (XAI). However, an explanation can be perceived differently and, thus, not solve the black-box problem for everyone. The domain of Human-Centered AI deals with this problem by adapting AI to users. We present a user-centered persona concept to evaluate XAI and use it to investigate end-users preferences for various explanation styles and contents in a mobile health stress monitoring application. The results of our online survey show that users' demographics and personality, as well as the type of explanation, impact explanation preferences, indicating that these are essential features for XAI design. We subsumed the results in three prototypical user personas: power-, casual-, and privacy-oriented users. Our insights bring an interactive, human-centered XAI closer to practical application.

Recent work shows issues of consistency with explanations, with methods generating local explanations that seem reasonable instance-wise, but that are inconsistent across instances. This suggests not only that instance-wise explanations can be unreliable, but mainly that, when interacting with a system via multiple inputs, a user may actually lose confidence in the system. To better analyse this issue, in this work we treat explanations as objects that can be subject to reasoning and present a formal model of the interactive scenario between user and system, via sequences of inputs, outputs, and explanations. We argue that explanations can be thought of as committing to some model behaviour (even if only prima facie), suggesting a form of entailment, which, we argue, should be thought of as non-monotonic. This allows: 1) to solve some considered inconsistencies in explanation, such as via a specificity relation; 2) to consider properties from the non-monotonic reasoning literature and discuss their desirability, gaining more insight on the interactive explanation scenario.

Although AI holds promise for improving human decision making in societally critical domains, it remains an open question how human-AI teams can reliably outperform AI alone and human alone in challenging prediction tasks (also known as complementary performance). We explore two directions to understand the gaps in achieving complementary performance. First, we argue that the typical experimental setup limits the potential of human-AI teams. To account for lower AI performance out-of-distribution than in-distribution because of distribution shift, we design experiments with different distribution types and investigate human performance for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution examples. Second, we develop novel interfaces to support interactive explanations so that humans can actively engage with AI assistance. Using in-person user study and large-scale randomized experiments across three tasks, we demonstrate a clear difference between in-distribution and out-of-distribution, and observe mixed results for interactive explanations: while interactive explanations improve human perception of AI assistance's usefulness, they may magnify human biases and lead to limited performance improvement. Overall, our work points out critical challenges and future directions towards complementary performance.