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The ability to determine whether a robot's grasp has a high chance of failing, before it actually does, can save significant time and avoid failures by planning for re-grasping or changing the strategy for that special case. Machine Learning (ML) offers one way to learn to predict grasp failure from historic data consisting of a robot's attempted grasps alongside labels of the success or failure. Unfortunately, most powerful ML models are black-box models that do not explain the reasons behind their predictions. In this paper, we investigate how ML can be used to predict robot grasp failure and study the tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability by comparing interpretable (white box) ML models that are inherently explainable with more accurate black box ML models that are inherently opaque. Our results show that one does not necessarily have to compromise accuracy for interpretability if we use an explanation generation method, such as Shapley Additive explanations (SHAP), to add explainability to the accurate predictions made by black box models. An explanation of a predicted fault can lead to an efficient choice of corrective action in the robot's design that can be taken to avoid future failures.
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Thermodynamics-inspired explanations of artificial intelligence
Abstract In recent years, predictive machine learning models have gained prominence across various scientific domains. However, their black-box nature necessitates establishing trust in them before accepting their predictions as accurate. One promising strategy involves employing explanation techniques that elucidate the rationale behind a model’s predictions in a way that humans can understand. However, assessing the degree of human interpretability of these explanations is a nontrivial challenge. In this work, we introduce interpretation entropy as a universal solution for evaluating the human interpretability of any linear model. Using this concept and drawing inspiration from classical thermodynamics, we present Thermodynamics-inspired Explainable Representations of AI and other black-box Paradigms, a method for generating optimally human-interpretable explanations in a model-agnostic manner. We demonstrate the wide-ranging applicability of this method by explaining predictions from various black-box model architectures across diverse domains, including molecular simulations, text, and image classification.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2044165
- PAR ID:
- 10540887
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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