This paper presents ExplainableFold, an explainable AI framework for protein structure prediction. Despite the success of AI-based methods such as AlphaFold in this field, the underlying reasons for their predictions remain unclear due to the black-box nature of deep learning models. To address this, we propose a counterfactual learning framework inspired by biological principles to generate counterfactual explanations for protein structure prediction, enabling a dry-lab experimentation approach. Our experimental results demonstrate the ability of ExplainableFold to generate high-quality explanations for AlphaFold's predictions, providing near-experimental understanding of the effects of amino acids on 3D protein structure. This framework has the potential to facilitate a deeper understanding of protein structures.
Currently, there is a significant amount of research being conducted in the field of artificial intelligence to improve the explainability and interpretability of deep learning models. It is found that if end-users understand the reason for the production of some output, it is easier to trust the system. Recommender systems are one example of systems that great efforts have been conducted to make their output more explainable. One method for producing a more explainable output is using counterfactual reasoning, which involves altering minimal features to generate a counterfactual item that results in changing the output of the system. This process allows the identification of input features that have a significant impact on the desired output, leading to effective explanations. In this paper, we present a method for generating counterfactual explanations for both tabular and textual features. We evaluated the performance of our proposed method on three real-world datasets and demonstrated a +5\% improvement on finding effective features (based on model-based measures) compared to the baseline method.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is transforming the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by enhancing the trust of end-users in machines. As the number of connected devices keeps on growing, the Internet of Things (IoT) market needs to be trustworthy for the end-users. However, existing literature still lacks a systematic and comprehensive survey work on the use of XAI for IoT. To bridge this lacking, in this paper, we address the XAI frameworks with a focus on their characteristics and support for IoT. We illustrate the widely-used XAI services for IoT applications, such as security enhancement, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Internet of City Things (IoCT). We also suggest the implementation choice of XAI models over IoT systems in these applications with appropriate examples and summarize the key inferences for future works. Moreover, we present the cutting-edge development in edge XAI structures and the support of sixth-generation (6G) communication services for IoT applications, along with key inferences. In a nutshell, this paper constitutes the first holistic compilation on the development of XAI-based frameworks tailored for the demands of future IoT use cases.
Decision-making algorithms are being used in important decisions, such as who should be enrolled in health care programs and be hired. Even though these systems are currently deployed in high-stakes scenarios, many of them cannot explain their decisions. This limitation has prompted the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) initiative, which aims to make algorithms explainable to comply with legal requirements, promote trust, and maintain accountability. This paper questions whether and to what extent explainability can help solve the responsibility issues posed by autonomous AI systems. We suggest that XAI systems that provide post-hoc explanations could be seen as blameworthy agents, obscuring the responsibility of developers in the decision-making process. Furthermore, we argue that XAI could result in incorrect attributions of responsibility to vulnerable stakeholders, such as those who are subjected to algorithmic decisions (i.e., patients), due to a misguided perception that they have control over explainable algorithms. This conflict between explainability and accountability can be exacerbated if designers choose to use algorithms and patients as moral and legal scapegoats. We conclude with a set of recommendations for how to approach this tension in the socio-technical process of algorithmic decision-making and a defense of hard regulation to prevent designers from escaping responsibility.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become a proven and indispensable machine learning tool. As a black-box model, it remains difficult to diagnose what aspects of the model's input drive the decisions of a DNN. In countless real-world domains, from legislation and law enforcement to healthcare, such diagnosis is essential to ensure that DNN decisions are driven by aspects appropriate in the context of its use. The development of methods and studies enabling the explanation of a DNN's decisions has thus blossomed into an active, broad area of research. A practitioner wanting to study explainable deep learning may be intimidated by the plethora of orthogonal directions the field has taken. This complexity is further exacerbated by competing definitions of what it means ``to explain'' the actions of a DNN and to evaluate an approach's ``ability to explain''. This article offers a field guide to explore the space of explainable deep learning aimed at those uninitiated in the field. The field guide: i) Introduces three simple dimensions defining the space of foundational methods that contribute to explainable deep learning, ii) discusses the evaluations for model explanations, iii) places explainability in the context of other related deep learning research areas, and iv) finally elaborates on user-oriented explanation designing and potential future directions on explainable deep learning. We hope the guide is used as an easy-to-digest starting point for those just embarking on research in this field.
Machine learning plays a role in many deployed decision systems, often in ways that are difficult or impossible to understand by human stakeholders. Explaining, in a human-understandable way, the relationship between the input and output of machine learning models is essential to the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems. A burgeoning body of research seeks to define the goals and methods of explainability in machine learning. In this paper, we seek to review and categorize research on counterfactual explanations, a specific class of explanation that provides a link between what could have happened had input to a model been changed in a particular way. Modern approaches to counterfactual explainability in machine learning draw connections to the established legal doctrine in many countries, making them appealing to fielded systems in high-impact areas such as finance and healthcare. Thus, we design a rubric with desirable properties of counterfactual explanation algorithms and comprehensively evaluate all currently-proposed algorithms against that rubric. Our rubric provides easy comparison and comprehension of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and serves as an introduction to major research themes in this field. We also identify gaps and discuss promising research directions in the space of counterfactual explainability.
As a field of AI, Machine Reasoning (MR) uses largely symbolic means to formalize and emulate abstract reasoning. Studies in early MR have notably started inquiries into Explainable AI (XAI) -- arguably one of the biggest concerns today for the AI community. Work on explainable MR as well as on MR approaches to explainability in other areas of AI has continued ever since. It is especially potent in modern MR branches, such as argumentation, constraint and logic programming, planning. We hereby aim to provide a selective overview of MR explainability techniques and studies in hopes that insights from this long track of research will complement well the current XAI landscape. This document reports our work in-progress on MR explainability.
Recommender systems play a fundamental role in web applications in filtering massive information and matching user interests. While many efforts have been devoted to developing more effective models in various scenarios, the exploration on the explainability of recommender systems is running behind. Explanations could help improve user experience and discover system defects. In this paper, after formally introducing the elements that are related to model explainability, we propose a novel explainable recommendation model through improving the transparency of the representation learning process. Specifically, to overcome the representation entangling problem in traditional models, we revise traditional graph convolution to discriminate information from different layers. Also, each representation vector is factorized into several segments, where each segment relates to one semantic aspect in data. Different from previous work, in our model, factor discovery and representation learning are simultaneously conducted, and we are able to handle extra attribute information and knowledge. In this way, the proposed model can learn interpretable and meaningful representations for users and items. Unlike traditional methods that need to make a trade-off between explainability and effectiveness, the performance of our proposed explainable model is not negatively affected after considering explainability. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of our model as well as explanation faithfulness.
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some context). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the transparency, persuasiveness, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and satisfaction of recommendation systems. In this survey, we review works on explainable recommendation in or before the year of 2019. We first highlight the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation on three perspectives: 1) We provide a chronological research timeline of explainable recommendation, including user study approaches in the early years and more recent model-based approaches. 2) We provide a two-dimensional taxonomy to classify existing explainable recommendation research: one dimension is the information source (or display style) of the explanations, and the other dimension is the algorithmic mechanism to generate explainable recommendations. 3) We summarize how explainable recommendation applies to different recommendation tasks, such as product recommendation, social recommendation, and POI recommendation. We also devote a section to discuss the explanation perspectives in broader IR and AI/ML research. We end the survey by discussing potential future directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area and beyond.
Incorporating knowledge graph into recommender systems has attracted increasing attention in recent years. By exploring the interlinks within a knowledge graph, the connectivity between users and items can be discovered as paths, which provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Such connectivity not only reveals the semantics of entities and relations, but also helps to comprehend a user's interest. However, existing efforts have not fully explored this connectivity to infer user preferences, especially in terms of modeling the sequential dependencies within and holistic semantics of a path. In this paper, we contribute a new model named Knowledge-aware Path Recurrent Network (KPRN) to exploit knowledge graph for recommendation. KPRN can generate path representations by composing the semantics of both entities and relations. By leveraging the sequential dependencies within a path, we allow effective reasoning on paths to infer the underlying rationale of a user-item interaction. Furthermore, we design a new weighted pooling operation to discriminate the strengths of different paths in connecting a user with an item, endowing our model with a certain level of explainability. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets about movie and music, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art solutions Collaborative Knowledge Base Embedding and Neural Factorization Machine.
Providing model-generated explanations in recommender systems is important to user experience. State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely ignored recently due to the availability of vast amount of data and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors and the knowledge is helpful for providing informed explanations regarding the recommended items. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning framework to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation, and based on the embedded knowledge base, a soft matching algorithm is proposed to generate personalized explanations for the recommended items. Experimental results on real-world e-commerce datasets verified the superior recommendation performance and the explainability power of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.