From Fitness Landscapes to Explainable AI and Back

Abstract

We consider and discuss the ways in which search landscapes might contribute to the future of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and vice versa. Landscapes are typically used to gain insight into algorithm search dynamics on optimisation problems; as such, it could be said that they explain algorithms and that they are a natural bridge between XAI and evolutionary computation. Despite this, there is very little existing literature which utilises landscapes for XAI, or which applies XAI techniques to landscape analysis. This position paper reviews the existing works, discusses possible future avenues, and advocates for increased research effort in this area.