xxAI - Beyond Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The success of statistical machine learning from big data, especially of deep learning, has made artificial intelligence (AI) very popular. Unfortunately, especially with the most successful methods, the results are very difficult to comprehend by human experts. The application of AI in areas that impact human life (e.g., agriculture, climate, forestry, health, etc.) has therefore led to an demand for trust, which can be fostered if the methods can be interpreted and thus explained to humans. The research field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) provides the necessary foundations and methods. Historically, XAI has focused on the development of methods to explain the decisions and internal mechanisms of complex AI systems, with much initial research concentrating on explaining how convolutional neural networks produce image classification predictions by producing visualizations which highlight what input patterns are most influential in activating hidden units, or are most responsible for a model’s decision. In this volume, we summarize research that outlines and takes next steps towards a broader vision for explainable AI in moving beyond explaining classifiers via such methods, to include explaining other kinds of models (e.g., unsupervised and reinforcement learning models) via a diverse array of XAI techniques (e.g., question-and-answering systems, structured explanations). In addition, we also intend to move beyond simply providing model explanations to directly improving the transparency, efficiency and generalization ability of models. We hope this volume presents not only exciting research developments in explainable AI but also a guide for what next areas to focus on within this fascinating and highly relevant research field as we enter the second decade of the deep learning revolution. This volume is an outcome of the ICML 2020 workshop on “XXAI: Extending Explainable AI Beyond Deep Models and Classifiers.”