Recently, a groundswell of research has identified the use of counterfactual explanations as a potentially significant solution to the Explainable AI (XAI) problem. It is argued that (a) technically, these counterfactual cases can be generated by permuting problem-features until a class change is found, (b) psychologically, they are much more causally informative than factual explanations, (c) legally, they are GDPR-compliant. However, there are issues around the finding of good counterfactuals using current techniques (e.g. sparsity and plausibility). We show that many commonly-used datasets appear to have few good counterfactuals for explanation purposes. So, we propose a new case based approach for generating counterfactuals using novel ideas about the counterfactual potential and explanatory coverage of a case-base. The new technique reuses patterns of good counterfactuals, present in a case-base, to generate analogous counterfactuals that can explain new problems and their solutions. Several experiments show how this technique can improve the counterfactual potential and explanatory coverage of case-bases that were previously found wanting.
This paper introduces the "grasp-ability test" as a "goodness" criteria by which to compare which explanation is more or less meaningful than others for users to understand the automated algorithmic data processing.
The XAI literature is decentralized, both in terminology and in publication venues, but recent years saw the community converge around keywords that make it possible to more reliably discover papers automatically. We use keyword search using the SemanticScholar API and manual curation to collect a well-formatted and reasonably comprehensive set of 5199 XAI papers, available at https://github.com/alonjacovi/XAI-Scholar . We use this collection to clarify and visualize trends about the size and scope of the literature, citation trends, cross-field trends, and collaboration trends. Overall, XAI i…
In recent years, there has been an explosion of AI research on counterfactual explanations as a solution to the problem of eXplainable AI (XAI). These explanations seem to offer technical, psychological and legal benefits over other explanation techniques. We survey 100 distinct counterfactual explanation methods reported in the literature. This survey addresses the extent to which these methods have been adequately evaluated, both psychologically and computationally, and quantifies the shortfalls occurring. For instance, only 21% of these methods have been user tested. Five key deficits in th…
University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）；Accenture Labs（埃森哲实验室）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre（VistaMilk SFI研究中心）
Counterfactual explanations are an increasingly popular form of post hoc explanation due to their (i) applicability across problem domains, (ii) proposed legal compliance (e.g., with GDPR), and (iii) reliance on the contrastive nature of human explanation. Although counterfactual explanations are normally used to explain individual predictive-instances, we explore a novel use case in which groups of similar instances are explained in a collective fashion using ``group counterfactuals'' (e.g., to highlight a repeating pattern of illness in a group of patients). These group counterfactuals meet …
Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
This paper presents an explainable AI (XAI) system that provides explanations for its predictions. The system consists of two key components -- namely, the prediction And-Or graph (AOG) model for recognizing and localizing concepts of interest in input data, and the XAI model for providing explanations to the user about the AOG's predictions. In this work, we focus on the XAI model specified to interact with the user in natural language, whereas the AOG's predictions are considered given and represented by the corresponding parse graphs (pg's) of the AOG. Our XAI model takes pg's as input and …
In this work, we report the practical and theoretical aspects of Explainable AI (XAI) identified in some fundamental literature. Although there is a vast body of work on representing the XAI backgrounds, most of the corpuses pinpoint a discrete direction of thoughts. Providing insights into literature in practice and theory concurrently is still a gap in this field. This is important as such connection facilitates a learning process for the early stage XAI researchers and give a bright stand for the experienced XAI scholars. Respectively, we first focus on the categories of black-box explanati…
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly complex and ubiquitous, these systems will be responsible for making decisions that directly affect individuals and society as a whole. Such decisions will need to be justified due to ethical concerns as well as trust, but achieving this has become difficult due to the `black-box' nature many AI models have adopted. Explainable AI (XAI) can potentially address this problem by explaining its actions, decisions and behaviours of the system to users. However, much research in XAI is done in a vacuum using only the researchers' intuition …
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research（人工智能研究中心）；University of Agder（阿格德大学）
The past decade has seen significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI), which has resulted in algorithms being adopted for resolving a variety of problems. However, this success has been met by increasing model complexity and employing black-box AI models that lack transparency. In response to this need, Explainable AI (XAI) has been proposed to make AI more transparent and thus advance the adoption of AI in critical domains. Although there are several reviews of XAI topics in the literature that identified challenges and potential research directions in XAI, these challenges and resear…
Neural network architectures are achieving superhuman performance on an expanding range of tasks. To effectively and safely deploy these systems, their decision-making must be understandable to a wide range of stakeholders. Methods to explain AI have been proposed to answer this challenge, but a lack of theory impedes the development of systematic abstractions which are necessary for cumulative knowledge gains. We propose Bayesian Teaching as a framework for unifying explainable AI (XAI) by integrating machine learning and human learning. Bayesian Teaching formalizes explanation as a communica…
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) 2.0: A Manifesto of Open Challenges and Interdisciplinary Research Directions
Technological University Dublin（都柏林理工大学）；University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）；University of Milano-Bicocca（米兰-比科卡大学）；IRCCS Ospedale Galeazzi Sant’Ambrogio（IRCCS 加莱阿齐-圣安布罗焦医院）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology（韩国科学技术院）；INEEJI Corporation（INEEJI公司）；University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）；TECNALIA（泰克纳利亚技术中心）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）；Meiji University（明治大学）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna（维也纳自然资源与生命科学大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
Saarland University（萨尔大学）；Technical University Dortmund（多特蒙德工业大学）；Institute of Intelligent Software（智能软件研究所）
Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these stakeholders' desiderata) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainabilit…
Royal Bank of Canada（加拿大皇家银行）；Innopolis University（Innopolis 大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）
The remarkable advancements in Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have fueled enthusiasm for using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in almost every domain; however, the opaqueness of these algorithms put a question mark on their applications in safety-critical systems. In this regard, the `explainability' dimension is not only essential to both explain the inner workings of black-box algorithms, but it also adds accountability and transparency dimensions that are of prime importance for regulators, consumers, and service providers. eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is the set of te…
In recent years, the field of explainable AI (XAI) has produced a vast collection of algorithms, providing a useful toolbox for researchers and practitioners to build XAI applications. With the rich application opportunities, explainability is believed to have moved beyond a demand by data scientists or researchers to comprehend the models they develop, to an essential requirement for people to trust and adopt AI deployed in numerous domains. However, explainability is an inherently human-centric property and the field is starting to embrace human-centered approaches. Human-computer interactio…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Explainable AI (XAI) systems are sociotechnical in nature; thus, they are subject to the sociotechnical gap--divide between the technical affordances and the social needs. However, charting this gap is challenging. In the context of XAI, we argue that charting the gap improves our problem understanding, which can reflexively provide actionable insights to improve explainability. Utilizing two case studies in distinct domains, we empirically derive a framework that facilitates systematic charting of the sociotechnical gap by connecting AI guidelines in the context of XAI and elucidating how to …
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the field of explainable AI (XAI), with a plethora of algorithms proposed in the literature. However, a lack of consensus on how to evaluate XAI hinders the advancement of the field. We highlight that XAI is not a monolithic set of technologies -- researchers and practitioners have begun to leverage XAI algorithms to build XAI systems that serve different usage contexts, such as model debugging and decision-support. Algorithmic research of XAI, however, often does not account for these diverse downstream usage contexts, resulting in limited effecti…
Proceedings of The first international workshop on eXplainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts)
University of the Arts London（伦敦艺术大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Central Conservatory of Music（中央音乐学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；NYU Shanghai（上海纽约大学）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO（弗劳恩霍夫工业工程研究所）
With recent progress in the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and increasing use in practice, the need for an evaluation of different XAI methods and their explanation quality in practical usage scenarios arises. For this purpose, we present VitrAI, which is a web-based service with the goal of uniformly demonstrating four different XAI algorithms in the context of three real life scenarios and evaluating their performance and comprehensibility for humans. This work reveals practical obstacles when adopting XAI methods and gives qualitative estimates on how well different appr…
IBM Research AI（IBM研究院AI）；IBM Design（IBM设计）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
A pervasive design issue of AI systems is their explainability--how to provide appropriate information to help users understand the AI. The technical field of explainable AI (XAI) has produced a rich toolbox of techniques. Designers are now tasked with the challenges of how to select the most suitable XAI techniques and translate them into UX solutions. Informed by our previous work studying design challenges around XAI UX, this work proposes a design process to tackle these challenges. We review our and related prior work to identify requirements that the process should fulfill, and according…
Meta Reality Labs（Meta现实实验室）；Purdue（普渡大学）；Aarhus Univ（奥胡斯大学）；Dartmouth（达特茅斯学院）；Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Explainable AI (XAI) has established itself as an important component of AI-driven interactive systems. With Augmented Reality (AR) becoming more integrated in daily lives, the role of XAI also becomes essential in AR because end-users will frequently interact with intelligent services. However, it is unclear how to design effective XAI experiences for AR. We propose XAIR, a design framework that addresses "when", "what", and "how" to provide explanations of AI output in AR. The framework was based on a multi-disciplinary literature review of XAI and HCI research, a large-scale survey probing …
IDIADA Fahrzeugtechnik GmbH（伊迪亚达汽车技术有限公司）；University of Munich (LMU)（慕尼黑大学）；Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG（保时捷股份公司）；ZBW - Leibniz Centre for Economics（莱布尼茨经济信息中心）；Kiel University（基尔大学）
In recent years, Explainable AI (xAI) attracted a lot of attention as various countries turned explanations into a legal right. xAI allows for improving models beyond the accuracy metric by, e.g., debugging the learned pattern and demystifying the AI's behavior. The widespread use of xAI brought new challenges. On the one hand, the number of published xAI algorithms underwent a boom, and it became difficult for practitioners to select the right tool. On the other hand, some experiments did highlight how easy data scientists could misuse xAI algorithms and misinterpret their results. To tackle …
Proceedings of The third international workshop on eXplainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts)
University of the Arts London（伦敦艺术大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Concordia University（Concordia大学）；Towson University（Towson大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Utah（乌得勒支大学）；Kingston University（Kingston大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Nottingham（特兰特大学）
On the Hardness of Computing Counterfactual and Semifactual Explanations in XAI
Faculty of Technology（技术学院）；Bielefeld University（比勒菲尔德大学）；Department of Business Development and Technology（商业发展与技术系）；Aarhus University（哥本哈根大学）；Department of Business Decisions and Analytics（商业决策与分析系）；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（矢量人工智能研究所）；Unity Health Toronto（多伦多统一健康）
We introduce Doctor XAvIer, a BERT-based diagnostic system that extracts relevant clinical data from transcribed patient-doctor dialogues and explains predictions using feature attribution methods. We present a novel performance plot and evaluation metric for feature attribution methods: Feature Attribution Dropping (FAD) curve and its Normalized Area Under the Curve (N-AUC). FAD curve analysis shows that integrated gradients outperforms Shapley values in explaining diagnosis classification. Doctor XAvIer outperforms the baseline with 0.97 F1-score in named entity recognition and symptom perti…
Features of Explainability: How users understand counterfactual and causal explanations for categorical and continuous features in XAI
Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院计算机科学学院Insight SFI数据分析中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院计算机科学学院VistaMilk SFI研究中心）；School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin（都柏林圣三一学院心理学院和神经科学研究所）
ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique Paris（巴黎高等先进技术学院，巴黎综合理工学院）；Inria Flowers（法国国家信息与自动化研究所Flowers团队）；Renault（雷诺公司）；TECNALIA（TECNALIA研究中心）；Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA)（巴斯克研究与技术联盟）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学）
Most of state of the art methods applied on time series consist of deep learning methods that are too complex to be interpreted. This lack of interpretability is a major drawback, as several applications in the real world are critical tasks, such as the medical field or the autonomous driving field. The explainability of models applied on time series has not gather much attention compared to the computer vision or the natural language processing fields. In this paper, we present an overview of existing explainable AI (XAI) methods applied on time series and illustrate the type of explanations …
Benchmarking Instance-Centric Counterfactual Algorithms for XAI: From White Box to Black Box
Human Technology Institute, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学人类技术研究所）；School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学信息系统学院）；INESC-ID Lisboa / Instituto Superior Técnico, ULisboa（INESC-ID里斯本/里斯本大学高等技术学院）
Nowadays, deep neural networks are widely used in mission critical systems such as healthcare, self-driving vehicles, and military which have direct impact on human lives. However, the black-box nature of deep neural networks challenges its use in mission critical applications, raising ethical and judicial concerns inducing lack of trust. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that promotes a set of tools, techniques, and algorithms that can generate high-quality interpretable, intuitive, human-understandable explanations of AI decisions. In additi…
A state-of-the-art systematic review on XAI applied to Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) of industrial asset is presented. This work provides an overview of the general trend of XAI in PHM, answers the question of accuracy versus explainability, the extent of human involvement, the explanation assessment and uncertainty quantification in PHM-XAI domain. Research articles associated with the subject, from 2015 to 2021 were selected from five known databases following PRISMA guidelines. Data was then extracted from the selected articles and examined. Several findings were synthesized. First…
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods lack ground truth. In its place, method developers have relied on axioms to determine desirable properties for their explanations' behavior. For high stakes uses of machine learning that require explainability, it is not sufficient to rely on axioms as the implementation, or its usage, can fail to live up to the ideal. As a result, there exists active research on validating the performance of XAI methods. The need for validation is especially magnified in domains with a reliance on XAI. A procedure frequently used to assess their utility, and t…
Proceedings of The second international workshop on eXplainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts)
University of the Arts London（伦敦艺术大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽皇后学院）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Kingston University（金斯顿大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Central Conservatory of Music（中央音乐学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Towson University（陶森大学）；University of Utah（犹他大学）；Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group Holding Limited（阿里巴巴集团控股有限公司）
Recently, artificial intelligence and machine learning in general have demonstrated remarkable performances in many tasks, from image processing to natural language processing, especially with the advent of deep learning. Along with research progress, they have encroached upon many different fields and disciplines. Some of them require high level of accountability and thus transparency, for example the medical sector. Explanations for machine decisions and predictions are thus needed to justify their reliability. This requires greater interpretability, which often means we need to understand t…
University of the Arts London（伦敦艺术大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Kingston University London（伦敦金斯顿大学）；Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；University of Utah（犹他大学）
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) seeks to produce explanations for those machine learning methods which are deemed opaque. However, there is considerable disagreement about what this means and how to achieve it. Authors disagree on what should be explained (topic), to whom something should be explained (stakeholder), how something should be explained (instrument), and why something should be explained (goal). In this paper, I employ insights from means-end epistemology to structure the field. According to means-end epistemology, different means ought to be rationally adopted to achiev…
