While a vast collection of explainable AI (XAI) algorithms has been developed in recent years, they have been criticized for significant gaps with how humans produce and consume explanations. As a result, current XAI techniques are often found to be hard to use and lack effectiveness. In this work, we attempt to close these gaps by making AI explanations selective ---a fundamental property of human explanations---by selectively presenting a subset of model reasoning based on what aligns with the recipient's preferences. We propose a general framework for generating selective explanations by leveraging human input on a small dataset. This framework opens up a rich design space that accounts for different selectivity goals, types of input, and more. As a showcase, we use a decision-support task to explore selective explanations based on what the decision-maker would consider relevant to the decision task. We conducted two experimental studies to examine three paradigms based on our proposed framework: in Study 1, we ask the participants to provide critique-based or open-ended input to generate selective explanations (self-input). In Study 2, we show the participants selective explanations based on input from a panel of similar users (annotator input). Our experiments demonstrate the promise of selective explanations in reducing over-reliance on AI and improving collaborative decision making and subjective perceptions of the AI system, but also paint a nuanced picture that attributes some of these positive effects to the opportunity to provide one's own input to augment AI explanations. Overall, our work proposes a novel XAI framework inspired by human communication behaviors and demonstrates its potential to encourage future work to make AI explanations more human-compatible.
Effects of Explanations in AI-Assisted Decision Making: Principles and Comparisons
Recent years have witnessed the growing literature in empirical evaluation of explainable AI (XAI) methods. This study contributes to this ongoing conversation by presenting a comparison on the effects of a set of established XAI methods in AI-assisted decision making. Based on our review of previous literature, we highlight three desirable properties that ideal AI explanations should satisfy — improve people’s understanding of the AI model, help people recognize the model uncertainty, and support people’s calibrated trust in the model. Through three randomized controlled experiments, we evaluate whether four types of common model-agnostic explainable AI methods satisfy these properties on two types of AI models of varying levels of complexity, and in two kinds of decision making contexts where people perceive themselves as having different levels of domain expertise. Our results demonstrate that many AI explanations do not satisfy any of the desirable properties when used on decision making tasks that people have little domain expertise in. On decision making tasks that people are more knowledgeable, the feature contribution explanation is shown to satisfy more desiderata of AI explanations, even when the AI model is inherently complex. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for improving the design of XAI methods to better support human decision making, and for advancing more rigorous empirical evaluation of XAI methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1850335
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10434195
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2160-6455
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 36
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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While EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches aim to improve human-AI collaborative decision-making by improving model transparency and mental model formations, experiential factors associated with human users can cause challenges in ways system designers do not anticipate. In this paper, we first showcase a user study on how anchoring bias can potentially affect mental model formations when users initially interact with an intelligent system and the role of explanations in addressing this bias. Using a video activity recognition tool in cooking domain, we asked participants to verify whether a set of kitchen policies are being followed, with each policy focusing on a weakness or a strength. We controlled the order of the policies and the presence of explanations to test our hypotheses. Our main finding shows that those who observed system strengths early-on were more prone to automation bias and made significantly more errors due to positive first impressions of the system, while they built a more accurate mental model of the system competencies. On the other hand, those who encountered weaknesses earlier made significantly fewer errors since they tended to rely more on themselves, while they also underestimated model competencies due to having a more negative first impression of the model. Motivated by these findings and similar existing work, we formalize and present a conceptual model of user’s past experiences that examine the relations between user’s backgrounds, experiences, and human factors in XAI systems based on usage time. Our work presents strong findings and implications, aiming to raise the awareness of AI designers towards biases associated with user impressions and backgrounds.more » « less
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Abstract 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 artificial intelligence (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 communication act of an explainer to shift the beliefs of an explainee. This formalization decomposes a wide range of XAI methods into four components: (a) the target inference, (b) the explanation, (c) the explainee model, and (d) the explainer model. The abstraction afforded by Bayesian Teaching to decompose XAI methods elucidates the invariances among them. The decomposition of XAI systems enables modular validation, as each of the first three components listed can be tested semi‐independently. This decomposition also promotes generalization through recombination of components from different XAI systems, which facilitates the generation of novel variants. These new variants need not be evaluated one by one provided that each component has been validated, leading to an exponential decrease in development time. Finally, by making the goal of explanation explicit, Bayesian Teaching helps developers to assess how suitable an XAI system is for its intended real‐world use case. Thus, Bayesian Teaching provides a theoretical framework that encourages systematic, scientific investigation of XAI.
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3519266
