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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. 

To support human decision making with machine learning models, we often need to elucidate patterns embedded in the models that are unsalient, unknown, or counterintuitive to humans. While existing approaches focus on explaining machine predictions with real-time assistance, we explore model-driven tutorials to help humans understand these patterns in a training phase. We consider both tutorials with guidelines from scientific papers, analogous to current practices of science communication, and automatically selected examples from training data with explanations. We use deceptive review detection as a testbed and conduct large-scale, randomized human-subject experiments to examine the effectiveness of such tutorials. We find that tutorials indeed improve human performance, with and without real-time assistance. In particular, although deep learning provides superior predictive performance than simple models, tutorials and explanations from simple models are more useful to humans. Our work suggests future directions for human-centered tutorials and explanations towards a synergy between humans and AI. 

Humans are the final decision makers in critical tasks that involve ethical and legal concerns, ranging from recidivism prediction, to medical diagnosis, to fighting against fake news. Although machine learning models can sometimes achieve impressive performance in these tasks, these tasks are not amenable to full automation. To realize the potential of machine learning for improving human decisions, it is important to understand how assistance from machine learning models affects human performance and human agency. In this paper, we use deception detection as a testbed and investigate how we can harness explanations and predictions of machine learning models to improve human performance while retaining human agency. We propose a spectrum between full human agency and full automation, and develop varying levels of machine assistance along the spectrum that gradually increase the influence of machine predictions. We find that without showing predicted labels, explanations alone slightly improve human performance in the end task. In comparison, human performance is greatly improved by showing predicted labels (>20% relative improvement) and can be further improved by explicitly suggesting strong machine performance. Interestingly, when predicted labels are shown, explanations of machine predictions induce a similar level of accuracy as an explicit statement of strong machine performance. Our results demonstrate a tradeoff between human performance and human agency and show that explanations of machine predictions can moderate this tradeoff. 

Feature importance is commonly used to explain machine predictions. While feature importance can be derived from a machine learning model with a variety of methods, the consistency of feature importance via different methods remains understudied. In this work, we systematically compare feature importance from built-in mechanisms in a model such as attention values and post-hoc methods that approximate model behavior such as LIME. Using text classification as a testbed, we find that 1) no matter which method we use, important features from traditional models such as SVM and XGBoost are more similar with each other, than with deep learning models; 2) post-hoc methods tend to generate more similar important features for two models than built-in methods. We further demonstrate how such similarity varies across instances. Notably, important features do not always resemble each other better when two models agree on the predicted label than when they disagree.