Towards Explanatory Interactive Image Captioning Using Top-Down and Bottom-Up Features, Beam Search and Re-ranking

The application of eXplainable artificial intelligence in studying cognition: A scoping review

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked renewed discussions on its trustworthiness and the concept of eXplainable AI (XAI). Recent research in neuroscience has emphasized the relevance of XAI in studying cognition. This scoping review aims to identify and analyze various XAI methods used to study the mechanisms and features of cognitive function and dysfunction. In this study, the collected evidence is qualitatively assessed to develop an effective framework for approaching XAI in cognitive neuroscience. Based on the Joanna Briggs Institute and preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses extension for scoping review guidelines, we searched for peer-reviewed articles on MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Google Scholar. Two reviewers performed data screening, extraction, and thematic analysis in parallel. Twelve eligible experimental studies published in the past decade were included. The results showed that the majority (75%) focused on normal cognitive functions such as perception, social cognition, language, executive function, and memory, while others (25%) examined impaired cognition. The predominant XAI methods employed were intrinsic XAI (58.3%), followed by attribution-based (41.7%) and example-based (8.3%) post hoc methods. Explainability was applied at a local (66.7%) or global (33.3%) scope. The findings, predominantly correlational, were anatomical (83.3%) or nonanatomical (16.7%). In conclusion, while these XAI techniques were lauded for their predictive power, robustness, testability, and plausibility, limitations included oversimplification, confounding factors, and inconsistencies. The reviewed studies showcased the potential of XAI models while acknowledging current challenges in causality and oversimplification, particularly emphasizing the need for reproducibility.

XAINES: Explaining AI with Narratives

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly pervasive: Internet of Things, in-car intelligent devices, robots, and virtual assistants, and their large-scale adoption makes it necessary to explain their behaviour, for example to their users who are impacted by their decisions, or to their developers who need to ensure their functionality. This requires, on the one hand, to obtain an accurate representation of the chain of events that caused the system to behave in a certain way (e.g., to make a specific decision). On the other hand, this causal chain needs to be communicated to the users depending on their needs and expectations. In this phase of explanation delivery, allowing interaction between user and model has the potential to improve both model quality and user experience. The XAINES project investigates the explanation of AI systems through narratives targeted to the needs of a specific audience, focusing on two important aspects that are crucial for enabling successful explanation: generating and selecting appropriate explanation content, i.e. the information to be contained in the explanation, and delivering this information to the user in an appropriate way. In this article, we present the project’s roadmap towards enabling the explanation of AI with narratives.

Agnostic Explanation of Model Change based on Feature Importance

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has mainly focused on static learning tasks so far. In this paper, we consider XAI in the context of online learning in dynamic environments, such as learning from real-time data streams, where models are learned incrementally and continuously adapted over the course of time. More specifically, we motivate the problem of explaining model change, i.e. explaining the difference between models before and after adaptation, instead of the models themselves. In this regard, we provide the first efficient model-agnostic approach to dynamically detecting, quantifying, and explaining significant model changes. Our approach is based on an adaptation of the well-known Permutation Feature Importance (PFI) measure. It includes two hyperparameters that control the sensitivity and directly influence explanation frequency, so that a human user can adjust the method to individual requirements and application needs. We assess and validate our method’s efficacy on illustrative synthetic data streams with three popular model classes.

Dual-Modal Transformer with Enhanced Inter- and Intra-Modality Interactions for Image Captioning

Image captioning is oriented towards describing an image with the best possible use of words that can provide a semantic, relatable meaning of the scenario inscribed. Different models can be used to accomplish this arduous task depending on the context and requirement of what needs to be achieved. An encoder–decoder model which uses the image feature vectors as an input to the encoder is often marked as one of the appropriate models to accomplish the captioning process. In the proposed work, a dual-modal transformer has been used which captures the intra- and inter-model interactions in a simultaneous manner within an attention block. The transformer architecture is quantitatively evaluated on a publicly available Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) dataset yielding a Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU)-4 Score of 85.01. The efficacy of the model is evaluated on Flickr 8k, Flickr 30k datasets and MS COCO datasets and results for the same is compared and analysed with the state-of-the-art methods. The results shows that the proposed model outperformed when compared with conventional models, such as the encoder–decoder model and attention model.

A Systematic Review of Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Terms of Different Application Domains and Tasks

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have recently been radically improved and are now being employed in almost every application domain to develop automated or semi-automated systems. To facilitate greater human acceptability of these systems, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has experienced significant growth over the last couple of years with the development of highly accurate models but with a paucity of explainability and interpretability. The literature shows evidence from numerous studies on the philosophy and methodologies of XAI. Nonetheless, there is an evident scarcity of secondary studies in connection with the application domains and tasks, let alone review studies following prescribed guidelines, that can enable researchers’ understanding of the current trends in XAI, which could lead to future research for domain- and application-specific method development. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on the recent developments of XAI methods and evaluation metrics concerning different application domains and tasks. This study considers 137 articles published in recent years and identified through the prominent bibliographic databases. This systematic synthesis of research articles resulted in several analytical findings: XAI methods are mostly developed for safety-critical domains worldwide, deep learning and ensemble models are being exploited more than other types of AI/ML models, visual explanations are more acceptable to end-users and robust evaluation metrics are being developed to assess the quality of explanations. Research studies have been performed on the addition of explanations to widely used AI/ML models for expert users. However, more attention is required to generate explanations for general users from sensitive domains such as finance and the judicial system.