mstyslavity/prisma_v3 huggingface dataset:
Software producers are now recognizing the importance of improving their products' suitability for diverse populations, but little attention has been given to measurements to shed light on products' suitability to individuals below the median socioeconomic status (SES) -- who, by definition, make up half the population. To enable software practitioners to attend to both lower- and higher-SES individuals, this paper provides two new surveys that together facilitate measuring how well a software product serves socioeconomically diverse populations. The first survey (SES-Subjective) is who-oriented: it measures who their potential or current users are in terms of their subjective SES (perceptions of their SES). The second survey (SES-Facets) is why-oriented: it collects individuals' values for an evidence-based set of facet values (individual traits) that (1) statistically differ by SES and (2) affect how an individual works and problem-solves with software products. Our empirical validations with deployments at University A and University B (464 and 522 responses, respectively) showed that both surveys are reliable. Further, our results statistically agree with both ground truth data on respondents' socioeconomic statuses and with predictions from foundational literature. Finally, we explain how the pair of surveys is uniquely actionable by software practitioners, such as in requirements gathering, debugging, quality assurance activities, maintenance activities, and fulfilling legal reporting requirements such as those being drafted by various governments for AI-powered software.
This position paper emphasizes the critical gap in the evaluation of Explainable AI (XAI) due to the lack of standardized and reliable metrics, which diminishes its practical value, trustworthiness, and ability to meet regulatory requirements. Current evaluation methods are often fragmented, subjective, and biased, making them prone to manipulation and complicating the assessment of complex models. A central issue is the absence of a ground truth for explanations, complicating comparisons across various XAI approaches. To address these challenges, we advocate for widespread research into developing robust, context-sensitive evaluation metrics. These metrics should be resistant to manipulation, relevant to each use case, and based on human judgment and real-world applicability. We also recommend creating domain-specific evaluation benchmarks that align with the user and regulatory needs of sectors such as healthcare and finance. By encouraging collaboration among academia, industry, and regulators, we can create standards that balance flexibility and consistency, ensuring XAI explanations are meaningful, trustworthy, and compliant with evolving regulations.
Recent advancements in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have demonstrated impressive performance in the question-answering (QA) task. However, most previous works predominantly focus on text-based answers. While some studies address multimodal data, they still fall short in generating comprehensive multimodal answers, particularly for explaining concepts or providing step-by-step tutorials on how to accomplish specific goals. This capability is especially valuable for applications such as enterprise chatbots and settings such as customer service and educational systems, where the answers are sourced from multimodal data. In this paper, we introduce a simple and effective framework named MuRAR (Multimodal Retrieval and Answer Refinement). MuRAR enhances text-based answers by retrieving relevant multimodal data and refining the responses to create coherent multimodal answers. This framework can be easily extended to support multimodal answers in enterprise chatbots with minimal modifications. Human evaluation results indicate that multimodal answers generated by MuRAR are more useful and readable compared to plain text answers.
Understanding and explaining differences between audio recordings is crucial for fields like audio forensics, quality assessment, and audio generation. This involves identifying and describing audio events, acoustic scenes, signal characteristics, and their emotional impact on listeners. This paper stands out as the first work to comprehensively study the task of explaining audio differences and then propose benchmark, baselines for the task. First, we present two new datasets for audio difference explanation derived from the AudioCaps and Clotho audio captioning datasets. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we generate three levels of difference explanations: (1) concise descriptions of audio events and objects, (2) brief sentences about audio events, acoustic scenes, and signal properties, and (3) comprehensive explanations that include semantics and listener emotions. For the baseline, we use prefix tuning where audio embeddings from two audio files are used to prompt a frozen language model. Our empirical analysis and ablation studies reveal that the naive baseline struggles to distinguish perceptually similar sounds and generate detailed tier 3 explanations. To address these limitations, we propose ADIFF, which introduces a cross-projection module, position captioning, and a three-step training process to enhance the model's ability to produce detailed explanations. We evaluate our model using objective metrics and human evaluation and show our model enhancements lead to significant improvements in performance over naive baseline and SoTA Audio-Language Model (ALM) Qwen Audio. Lastly, we conduct multiple ablation studies to study the effects of cross-projection, language model parameters, position captioning, third stage fine-tuning, and present our findings. Our benchmarks, findings, and strong baseline pave the way for nuanced and human-like explanations of audio differences.
Hand kinematics can be measured in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with the intention to predict the user's intention in a reach-to-grasp action. Using multiple hand sensors, multivariate time series data are being captured. Given a number of possible actions on a number of objects, the goal is to classify the multivariate time series data, where the class shall be predicted as early as possible. Many machine-learning methods have been developed for such classification tasks, where different approaches produce favorable solutions on different data sets. We, therefore, employ an ensemble approach that includes and weights different approaches. To provide a trustworthy classification production, we present the XMTC tool that incorporates coordinated multiple-view visualizations to analyze the predictions. Temporal accuracy plots, confusion matrix heatmaps, temporal confidence heatmaps, and partial dependence plots allow for the identification of the best trade-off between early prediction and prediction quality, the detection and analysis of challenging classification conditions, and the investigation of the prediction evolution in an overview and detail manner. We employ XMTC to real-world HCI data in multiple scenarios and show that good classification predictions can be achieved early on with our classifier as well as which conditions are easy to distinguish, which multivariate time series measurements impose challenges, and which features have most impact.
To design data visualizations that are easy to comprehend, we need to understand how people with different interests read them. Computational models of predicting scanpaths on charts could complement empirical studies by offering estimates of user performance inexpensively; however, previous models have been limited to gaze patterns and overlooked the effects of tasks. Here, we contribute Chartist, a computational model that simulates how users move their eyes to extract information from the chart in order to perform analysis tasks, including value retrieval, filtering, and finding extremes. The novel contribution lies in a two-level hierarchical control architecture. At the high level, the model uses LLMs to comprehend the information gained so far and applies this representation to select a goal for the lower-level controllers, which, in turn, move the eyes in accordance with a sampling policy learned via reinforcement learning. The model is capable of predicting human-like task-driven scanpaths across various tasks. It can be applied in fields such as explainable AI, visualization design evaluation, and optimization. While it displays limitations in terms of generalizability and accuracy, it takes modeling in a promising direction, toward understanding human behaviors in interacting with charts.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant successes across various applications, where the most noticeable is to a series of emerging capabilities, particularly in the areas of In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). To better understand and control model performance, many studies have begun investigating the underlying causes of these phenomena and their impact on task outcomes. However, existing explanatory frameworks predominantly focus on isolating and explaining ICL and CoT independently, leading to an incomplete understanding of their combined influence on model performance. To address this gap, we propose the Electronic Circuit Model (ECM), which provides a foundation for developing scalable, learnable policies and improving the management of AI-generated content. Specifically, ECM conceptualizes model behavior as an electronic circuit: ICL is represented as semantic magnetic field to providing an additional voltage following Faraday's Law, while CoT is modeled as series resistors to constrain the model output performance following Ohm's Law. Experimental results demonstrate that the ECM effectively predicts and explains LLM performance across a variety of prompting strategies. Furthermore, we apply ECM to advanced reasoning strategy optimization on a series of tasks, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving competitive performance that surpasses nearly 80% of top human competitors.
Tree-based and rule-based machine learning models play pivotal roles in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) due to their unique ability to provide explanations in the form of tree or rule sets that are easily understandable and interpretable, making them essential for applications in which trust in model decisions is necessary. These transparent models are typically used in surrogate modeling, a post-hoc XAI approach for explaining the logic of black-box models, enabling users to comprehend and trust complex predictive systems while maintaining competitive performance. This study proposes the Cost-Sensitive Rule and Tree Extraction (CORTEX) method, a novel rule-based XAI algorithm grounded in the multi-class cost-sensitive decision tree (CSDT) method. The original version of the CSDT is extended to classification problems with more than two classes by inducing the concept of an n-dimensional class-dependent cost matrix. The performance of CORTEX as a rule-extractor XAI method is compared to other post-hoc tree and rule extraction methods across several datasets with different numbers of classes. Several quantitative evaluation metrics are employed to assess the explainability of generated rule sets. Our findings demonstrate that CORTEX is competitive with other tree-based methods and can be superior to other rule-based methods across different datasets. The extracted rule sets suggest the advantages of using the CORTEX method over other methods by producing smaller rule sets with shorter rules on average across datasets with a diverse number of classes. Overall, the results underscore the potential of CORTEX as a powerful XAI tool for scenarios that require the generation of clear, human-understandable rules while maintaining good predictive performance.
This article focuses on elucidating the concept of consciousness from a relational and post-phenomenological theory of non-human communication agents (ANHC). Specifically, we explore the contributions of Thomas Metzinger s Self Model Theory, Katherine Hayles conceptualizations of non-conscious cognitive processes centered on knowledge processing phenomena shared between biological and technical systems and Lenore and Manuel Blum s theoretical perspective on computation, which defines consciousness as an emergent phenomenon of complex computational systems, arising from the appropriate organization of their inorganic materiality. Building on interactions with non-human cognitive agents, among other factors, the explainability of sociotechnical systems challenges the humanistic common sense of modern philosophy and science. This critical integration of various approaches ultimately questions other concepts associated with consciousness, such as autonomy, freedom, and mutual responsibility. The aim is to contribute to a necessary discussion for designing new frameworks of understanding that pave the way toward an ethical and pragmatic approach to addressing contemporary challenges in the design, regulation, and interaction with ANHC. Such frameworks, in turn, enable a more inclusive and relational understanding of agency in an interconnected world.
We introduce GeXSe (Generative Explanatory Sensor System), a novel framework designed to extract interpretable sensor-based and vision domain features from non-invasive smart space sensors. We combine these to provide a comprehensive explanation of sensor-activation patterns in activity recognition tasks. This system leverages advanced machine learning architectures, including transformer blocks, Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC), and diffusion models, to provide a more detailed understanding of sensor-based human activity data. A standout feature of GeXSe is our unique Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) with linear, ReLU, and normalization layers, specially devised for optimal performance on small datasets. It also yields meaningful activation maps to explain sensor-based activation patterns. The standard approach is based on a CNN model, which our MLP model outperforms.GeXSe offers two types of explanations: sensor-based activation maps and visual domain explanations using short videos. These methods offer a comprehensive interpretation of the output from non-interpretable sensor data, thereby augmenting the interpretability of our model. Utilizing the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) for evaluation, it outperforms established methods, improving baseline performance by about 6\%. GeXSe also achieves a high F1 score of up to 0.85, demonstrating precision, recall, and noise resistance, marking significant progress in reliable and explainable smart space sensing systems.
We introduce Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) as a framework for enhancing large language models (LLMs) through cognitive prompting in complex reasoning tasks. CMT leverages metaphorical mappings to structure abstract reasoning, improving models' ability to process and explain intricate concepts. By incorporating CMT-based prompts, we guide LLMs toward more structured and human-like reasoning patterns. To evaluate this approach, we compare four native models (Llama3.2, Phi3, Gemma2, and Mistral) against their CMT-augmented counterparts on benchmark tasks spanning domain-specific reasoning, creative insight, and metaphor interpretation. Responses were automatically evaluated using the Llama3.3 70B model. Experimental results indicate that CMT prompting significantly enhances reasoning accuracy, clarity, and metaphorical coherence, outperforming baseline models across all evaluated tasks.
It is often argued that effective human-centered explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) should resemble human reasoning. However, empirical investigations of how concepts from cognitive science can aid the design of XAI are lacking. Based on insights from cognitive science, we propose a framework of explanatory modes to analyze how people frame explanations, whether mechanistic, teleological, or counterfactual. Using the complex safety-critical domain of autonomous driving, we conduct an experiment consisting of two studies on (i) how people explain the behavior of a vehicle in 14 unique scenarios (N1=54) and (ii) how they perceive these explanations (N2=382), curating the novel Human Explanations for Autonomous Driving Decisions (HEADD) dataset. Our main finding is that participants deem teleological explanations significantly better quality than counterfactual ones, with perceived teleology being the best predictor of perceived quality. Based on our results, we argue that explanatory modes are an important axis of analysis when designing and evaluating XAI and highlight the need for a principled and empirically grounded understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of explanation. The HEADD dataset and our code are available at: https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/8930.
As Vision Transformers (ViTs) are increasingly adopted in sensitive vision applications, there is a growing demand for improved interpretability. This has led to efforts to forward-align these models with carefully annotated abstract, human-understandable semantic entities - concepts. Concepts provide global rationales to the model predictions and can be quickly understood/intervened on by domain experts. Most current research focuses on designing model-agnostic, plug-and-play generic concept-based explainability modules that do not incorporate the inner workings of foundation models (e.g., inductive biases, scale invariance, etc.) during training. To alleviate this issue for ViTs, in this paper, we propose ASCENT-ViT, an attention-based, concept learning framework that effectively composes scale and position-aware representations from multiscale feature pyramids and ViT patch representations, respectively. Further, these representations are aligned with concept annotations through attention matrices - which incorporate spatial and global (semantic) concepts. ASCENT-ViT can be utilized as a classification head on top of standard ViT backbones for improved predictive performance and accurate and robust concept explanations as demonstrated on five datasets, including three widely used benchmarks (CUB, Pascal APY, Concept-MNIST) and 2 real-world datasets (AWA2, KITS).
Objective: Assessing Alzheimer's disease (AD) using high-dimensional radiology images is clinically important but challenging. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced AD diagnosis, it remains unclear how to design AI models embracing predictability and explainability. Here, we propose VisTA, a multimodal language-vision model assisted by contrastive learning, to optimize disease prediction and evidence-based, interpretable explanations for clinical decision-making. Methods: We developed VisTA (Vision-Text Alignment Model) for AD diagnosis. Architecturally, we built VisTA from BiomedCLIP and fine-tuned it using contrastive learning to align images with verified abnormalities and their descriptions. To train VisTA, we used a constructed reference dataset containing images, abnormality types, and descriptions verified by medical experts. VisTA produces four outputs: predicted abnormality type, similarity to reference cases, evidence-driven explanation, and final AD diagnoses. To illustrate VisTA's efficacy, we reported accuracy metrics for abnormality retrieval and dementia prediction. To demonstrate VisTA's explainability, we compared its explanations with human experts' explanations. Results: Compared to 15 million images used for baseline pretraining, VisTA only used 170 samples for fine-tuning and obtained significant improvement in abnormality retrieval and dementia prediction. For abnormality retrieval, VisTA reached 74% accuracy and an AUC of 0.87 (26% and 0.74, respectively, from baseline models). For dementia prediction, VisTA achieved 88% accuracy and an AUC of 0.82 (30% and 0.57, respectively, from baseline models). The generated explanations agreed strongly with human experts' and provided insights into the diagnostic process. Taken together, VisTA optimize prediction, clinical reasoning, and explanation.
Adding explanations to recommender systems is said to have multiple benefits, such as increasing user trust or system transparency. Previous work from other application areas suggests that specific user characteristics impact the users' perception of the explanation. However, we rarely find this type of evaluation for recommender systems explanations. This paper addresses this gap by surveying 124 papers in which recommender systems explanations were evaluated in user studies. We analyzed their participant descriptions and study results where the impact of user characteristics on the explanation effects was measured. Our findings suggest that the results from the surveyed studies predominantly cover specific users who do not necessarily represent the users of recommender systems in the evaluation domain. This may seriously hamper the generalizability of any insights we may gain from current studies on explanations in recommender systems. We further find inconsistencies in the data reporting, which impacts the reproducibility of the reported results. Hence, we recommend actions to move toward a more inclusive and reproducible evaluation.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasing in capability and popularity, propelling their application in new domains -- including as replacements for human participants in computational social science, user testing, annotation tasks, and more. In many settings, researchers seek to distribute their surveys to a sample of participants that are representative of the underlying human population of interest. This means in order to be a suitable replacement, LLMs will need to be able to capture the influence of positionality (i.e., relevance of social identities like gender and race). However, we show that there are two inherent limitations in the way current LLMs are trained that prevent this. We argue analytically for why LLMs are likely to both misportray and flatten the representations of demographic groups, then empirically show this on 4 LLMs through a series of human studies with 3200 participants across 16 demographic identities. We also discuss a third limitation about how identity prompts can essentialize identities. Throughout, we connect each limitation to a pernicious history of epistemic injustice against the value of lived experiences that explains why replacement is harmful for marginalized demographic groups. Overall, we urge caution in use cases where LLMs are intended to replace human participants whose identities are relevant to the task at hand. At the same time, in cases where the benefits of LLM replacement are determined to outweigh the harms (e.g., the goal is to supplement rather than fully replace, engaging human participants may cause them harm), we provide inference-time techniques that we empirically demonstrate do reduce, but do not remove, these harms.