XAI for All: Can Large Language Models Simplify Explainable AI?

The field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) often focuses on users with a strong technical background, making it challenging for non-experts to understand XAI methods. This paper presents "x-[plAIn]", a new approach to make XAI more accessible to a wider audience through a custom Large Language Model (LLM), developed using ChatGPT Builder. Our goal was to design a model that can generate clear, concise summaries of various XAI methods, tailored for different audiences, including business professionals and academics. The key feature of our model is its ability to adapt explanations to match each audience group's knowledge level and interests. Our approach still offers timely insights, facilitating the decision-making process by the end users. Results from our use-case studies show that our model is effective in providing easy-to-understand, audience-specific explanations, regardless of the XAI method used. This adaptability improves the accessibility of XAI, bridging the gap between complex AI technologies and their practical applications. Our findings indicate a promising direction for LLMs in making advanced AI concepts more accessible to a diverse range of users.

Enhancing Explainability in Mobility Data Science through a combination of methods

In the domain of Mobility Data Science, the intricate task of interpreting models trained on trajectory data, and elucidating the spatio-temporal movement of entities, has persistently posed significant challenges. Conventional XAI techniques, although brimming with potential, frequently overlook the distinct structure and nuances inherent within trajectory data. Observing this deficiency, we introduced a comprehensive framework that harmonizes pivotal XAI techniques: LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), Saliency maps, attention mechanisms, direct trajectory visualization, and Permutation Feature Importance (PFI). Unlike conventional strategies that deploy these methods singularly, our unified approach capitalizes on the collective efficacy of these techniques, yielding deeper and more granular insights for models reliant on trajectory data. In crafting this synthesis, we effectively address the multifaceted essence of trajectories, achieving not only amplified interpretability but also a nuanced, contextually rich comprehension of model decisions. To validate and enhance our framework, we undertook a survey to gauge preferences and reception among various user demographics. Our findings underscored a dichotomy: professionals with academic orientations, particularly those in roles like Data Scientist, IT Expert, and ML Engineer, showcased a profound, technical understanding and often exhibited a predilection for amalgamated methods for interpretability. Conversely, end-users or individuals less acquainted with AI and Data Science showcased simpler inclinations, such as bar plots indicating timestep significance or visual depictions pinpointing pivotal segments of a vessel's trajectory.

XAI for time-series classification leveraging image highlight methods

Although much work has been done on explainability in the computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) fields, there is still much work to be done to explain methods applied to time series as time series by nature can not be understood at first sight. In this paper, we present a Deep Neural Network (DNN) in a teacher-student architecture (distillation model) that offers interpretability in time-series classification tasks. The explainability of our approach is based on transforming the time series to 2D plots and applying image highlight methods (such as LIME and GradCam), making the predictions interpretable. At the same time, the proposed approach offers increased accuracy competing with the baseline model with the trade-off of increasing the training time.