Interplay between Federated Learning and Explainable Artificial Intelligence: a Scoping Review

The joint implementation of Federated learning (FL) and Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) will allow training models from distributed data and explaining their inner workings while preserving important aspects of privacy. Towards establishing the benefits and tensions associated with their interplay, this scoping review maps those publications that jointly deal with FL and XAI, focusing on publications where an interplay between FL and model interpretability or post-hoc explanations was found. In total, 37 studies met our criteria, with more papers focusing on explanation methods (mainly feature relevance) than on interpretability (mainly algorithmic transparency). Most works used simulated horizontal FL setups involving 10 or fewer data centers. Only one study explicitly and quantitatively analyzed the influence of FL on model explanations, revealing a significant research gap. Aggregation of interpretability metrics across FL nodes created generalized global insights at the expense of node-specific patterns being diluted. 8 papers addressed the benefits of incorporating explanation methods as a component of the FL algorithm. Studies using established FL libraries or following reporting guidelines are a minority. More quantitative research and structured, transparent practices are needed to fully understand their mutual impact and under which conditions it happens.

Explaining Human Activity Recognition with SHAP: Validating Insights with Perturbation and Quantitative Measures

In Human Activity Recognition (HAR), understanding the intricacy of body movements within high-risk applications is essential. This study uses SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to explain the decision-making process of Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) when classifying activities with skeleton data. We employ SHAP to explain two real-world datasets: one for cerebral palsy (CP) classification and the widely used NTU RGB+D 60 action recognition dataset. To test the explanation, we introduce a novel perturbation approach that modifies the model's edge importance matrix, allowing us to evaluate the impact of specific body key points on prediction outcomes. To assess the fidelity of our explanations, we employ informed perturbation, targeting body key points identified as important by SHAP and comparing them against random perturbation as a control condition. This perturbation enables a judgment on whether the body key points are truly influential or non-influential based on the SHAP values. Results on both datasets show that body key points identified as important through SHAP have the largest influence on the accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity metrics. Our findings highlight that SHAP can provide granular insights into the input feature contribution to the prediction outcome of GCNs in HAR tasks. This demonstrates the potential for more interpretable and trustworthy models in high-stakes applications like healthcare or rehabilitation.

From Movements to Metrics: Evaluating Explainable AI Methods in Skeleton-Based Human Activity Recognition

The advancement of deep learning in human activity recognition (HAR) using 3D skeleton data is critical for applications in healthcare, security, sports, and human-computer interaction. This paper tackles a well-known gap in the field, which is the lack of testing in the applicability and reliability of XAI evaluation metrics in the skeleton-based HAR domain. We have tested established XAI metrics namely faithfulness and stability on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to address this problem. The study also introduces a perturbation method that respects human biomechanical constraints to ensure realistic variations in human movement. Our findings indicate that \textit{faithfulness} may not be a reliable metric in certain contexts, such as with the EfficientGCN model. Conversely, stability emerges as a more dependable metric when there is slight input data perturbations. CAM and Grad-CAM are also found to produce almost identical explanations, leading to very similar XAI metric performance. This calls for the need for more diversified metrics and new XAI methods applied in skeleton-based HAR.

AutoGCN -- Towards Generic Human Activity Recognition with Neural Architecture Search

This paper introduces AutoGCN, a generic Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs). HAR has gained attention due to advances in deep learning, increased data availability, and enhanced computational capabilities. At the same time, GCNs have shown promising results in modeling relationships between body key points in a skeletal graph. While domain experts often craft dataset-specific GCN-based methods, their applicability beyond this specific context is severely limited. AutoGCN seeks to address this limitation by simultaneously searching for the ideal hyperparameters and architecture combination within a versatile search space using a reinforcement controller while balancing optimal exploration and exploitation behavior with a knowledge reservoir during the search process. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets focused on skeleton-based action recognition to assess the proposed algorithm's performance. Our experimental results underscore the effectiveness of AutoGCN in constructing optimal GCN architectures for HAR, outperforming conventional NAS and GCN methods, as well as random search. These findings highlight the significance of a diverse search space and an expressive input representation to enhance the network performance and generalizability.

Lecture Notes in Probabilistic Diffusion Models

Diffusion models are loosely modelled based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, where \textit{diffusion} refers to particles flowing from high-concentration regions towards low-concentration regions. In statistics, the meaning is quite similar, namely the process of transforming a complex distribution $p_{\text{complex}}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ to a simple distribution $p_{\text{prior}}$ on the same domain. This constitutes a Markov chain of diffusion steps of slowly adding random noise to data, followed by a reverse diffusion process in which the data is reconstructed from the noise. The diffusion model learns the data manifold to which the original and thus the reconstructed data samples belong, by training on a large number of data points. While the diffusion process pushes a data sample off the data manifold, the reverse process finds a trajectory back to the data manifold. Diffusion models have -- unlike variational autoencoder and flow models -- latent variables with the same dimensionality as the original data, and they are currently\footnote{At the time of writing, 2023.} outperforming other approaches -- including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) -- to modelling the distribution of, e.g., natural images.

Information based explanation methods for deep learning agents -- with applications on large open-source chess models

With large chess-playing neural network models like AlphaZero contesting the state of the art within the world of computerised chess, two challenges present themselves: The question of how to explain the domain knowledge internalised by such models, and the problem that such models are not made openly available. This work presents the re-implementation of the concept detection methodology applied to AlphaZero in McGrath et al. (2022), by using large, open-source chess models with comparable performance. We obtain results similar to those achieved on AlphaZero, while relying solely on open-source resources. We also present a novel explainable AI (XAI) method, which is guaranteed to highlight exhaustively and exclusively the information used by the explained model. This method generates visual explanations tailored to domains characterised by discrete input spaces, as is the case for chess. Our presented method has the desirable property of controlling the information flow between any input vector and the given model, which in turn provides strict guarantees regarding what information is used by the trained model during inference. We demonstrate the viability of our method by applying it to standard 8x8 chess, using large open-source chess models.

Concept backpropagation: An Explainable AI approach for visualising learned concepts in neural network models

Neural network models are widely used in a variety of domains, often as black-box solutions, since they are not directly interpretable for humans. The field of explainable artificial intelligence aims at developing explanation methods to address this challenge, and several approaches have been developed over the recent years, including methods for investigating what type of knowledge these models internalise during the training process. Among these, the method of concept detection, investigates which \emph{concepts} neural network models learn to represent in order to complete their tasks. In this work, we present an extension to the method of concept detection, named \emph{concept backpropagation}, which provides a way of analysing how the information representing a given concept is internalised in a given neural network model. In this approach, the model input is perturbed in a manner guided by a trained concept probe for the described model, such that the concept of interest is maximised. This allows for the visualisation of the detected concept directly in the input space of the model, which in turn makes it possible to see what information the model depends on for representing the described concept. We present results for this method applied to a various set of input modalities, and discuss how our proposed method can be used to visualise what information trained concept probes use, and the degree as to which the representation of the probed concept is entangled within the neural network model itself.

Against Algorithmic Exploitation of Human Vulnerabilities

Decisions such as which movie to watch next, which song to listen to, or which product to buy online, are increasingly influenced by recommender systems and user models that incorporate information on users' past behaviours, preferences, and digitally created content. Machine learning models that enable recommendations and that are trained on user data may unintentionally leverage information on human characteristics that are considered vulnerabilities, such as depression, young age, or gambling addiction. The use of algorithmic decisions based on latent vulnerable state representations could be considered manipulative and could have a deteriorating impact on the condition of vulnerable individuals. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of machine learning models inadvertently modelling vulnerabilities, and want to raise awareness for this issue to be considered in legislation and AI ethics. Hence, we define and describe common vulnerabilities, and illustrate cases where they are likely to play a role in algorithmic decision-making. We propose a set of requirements for methods to detect the potential for vulnerability modelling, detect whether vulnerable groups are treated differently by a model, and detect whether a model has created an internal representation of vulnerability. We conclude that explainable artificial intelligence methods may be necessary for detecting vulnerability exploitation by machine learning-based recommendation systems.

Real-Time Counterfactual Explanations For Robotic Systems With Multiple Continuous Outputs

Although many machine learning methods, especially from the field of deep learning, have been instrumental in addressing challenges within robotic applications, we cannot take full advantage of such methods before these can provide performance and safety guarantees. The lack of trust that impedes the use of these methods mainly stems from a lack of human understanding of what exactly machine learning models have learned, and how robust their behaviour is. This is the problem the field of explainable artificial intelligence aims to solve. Based on insights from the social sciences, we know that humans prefer contrastive explanations, i.e.\ explanations answering the hypothetical question "what if?". In this paper, we show that linear model trees are capable of producing answers to such questions, so-called counterfactual explanations, for robotic systems, including in the case of multiple, continuous inputs and outputs. We demonstrate the use of this method to produce counterfactual explanations for two robotic applications. Additionally, we explore the issue of infeasibility, which is of particular interest in systems governed by the laws of physics.

Reinforcement Learning in an Adaptable Chess Environment for Detecting Human-understandable Concepts

Self-trained autonomous agents developed using machine learning are showing great promise in a variety of control settings, perhaps most remarkably in applications involving autonomous vehicles. The main challenge associated with self-learned agents in the form of deep neural networks, is their black-box nature: it is impossible for humans to interpret deep neural networks. Therefore, humans cannot directly interpret the actions of deep neural network based agents, or foresee their robustness in different scenarios. In this work, we demonstrate a method for probing which concepts self-learning agents internalise in the course of their training. For demonstration, we use a chess playing agent in a fast and light environment developed specifically to be suitable for research groups without access to enormous computational resources or machine learning models.