Explanations of AI Agents' actions are considered to be an important factor in improving users' trust in the decisions made by autonomous AI systems. However, as these autonomous systems evolve from reactive, i.e., acting on user input, to proactive, i.e., acting without requiring user intervention, there is a need to explore how the explanation for the actions of these agents should evolve. In this work, we explore the design of explanations through participatory design methods for a proactive auto-response messaging agent that can reduce perceived obligations and social pressure to respond quickly to incoming messages by providing unavailability-related context. We recruited 14 participants who worked in pairs during collaborative design sessions where they reasoned about the agent's design and actions. We qualitatively analyzed the data collected through these sessions and found that participants' reasoning about agent actions led them to speculate heavily on its design. These speculations significantly influenced participants' desire for explanations and the controls they sought to inform the agents' behavior. Our findings indicate a need to transform users' speculations into accurate mental models of agent design. Further, since the agent acts as a mediator in human-human communication, it is also necessary to account for social norms in its explanation design. Finally, user expertise in understanding their habits and behaviors allows the agent to learn from the user their preferences when justifying its actions.
Explaining in Time: Meeting Interactive Standards of Explanation for Robotic Systems
Explainability has emerged as a critical AI research objective, but the breadth of proposed methods and application domains suggest that criteria for explanation vary greatly. In particular, what counts as a good explanation, and what kinds of explanation are computationally feasible, has become trickier in light of oqaque “black box” systems such as deep neural networks. Explanation in such cases has drifted from what many philosophers stipulated as having to involve deductive and causal principles to mere “interpretation,” which approximates what happened in the target system to varying degrees. However, such post hoc constructed rationalizations are highly problematic for social robots that operate interactively in spaces shared with humans. For in such social contexts, explanations of behavior, and, in particular, justifications for violations of expected behavior, should make reference to socially accepted principles and norms. In this article, we show how a social robot’s actions can face explanatory demands for how it came to act on its decision, what goals, tasks, or purposes its design had those actions pursue and what norms or social constraints the system recognizes in the course of its action. As a result, we argue that explanations for social robots will need to be accurate representations of the system’s operation along causal, purposive, and justificatory lines. These explanations will need to generate appropriate references to principles and norms—explanations based on mere “interpretability” will ultimately fail to connect the robot’s behaviors to its appropriate determinants. We then lay out the foundations for a cognitive robotic architecture for HRI, together with particular component algorithms, for generating explanations and engaging in justificatory dialogues with human interactants. Such explanations track the robot’s actual decision-making and behavior, which themselves are determined by normative principles the robot can describe and use for justifications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1723963
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10301358
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2573-9522
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 23
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Discussion of the “right to an explanation” has been increasingly relevant because of its potential utility for auditing automated decision systems, as well as for making objections to such decisions. However, most existing work on explanations focuses on collaborative environments, where designers are motivated to implement good-faith explanations that reveal potential weaknesses of a decision system. This motivation may not hold in an auditing environment. Thus, we ask: how much could explanations be used maliciously to defend a decision system? In this paper, we demonstrate how a black-box explanation system developed to defend a black-box decision system could manipulate decision recipients or auditors into accepting an intentionally discriminatory decision model. In a case-by-case scenario where decision recipients are unable to share their cases and explanations, we find that most individual decision recipients could receive a verifiable justification, even if the decision system is intentionally discriminatory. In a system-wide scenario where every decision is shared, we find that while justifications frequently contradict each other, there is no intuitive threshold to determine if these contradictions are because of malicious justifications or because of simplicity requirements of these justifications conflicting with model behavior. We end with discussion of how system-wide metrics may be more useful than explanation systems for evaluating overall decision fairness, while explanations could be useful outside of fairness auditing.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3457183
