Towards User-Focused Research in Training Data Attribution for Human-Centered Explainable AI

While Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make AI understandable and useful to humans, it has been criticised for relying too much on formalism and solutionism, focusing more on mathematical soundness than user needs. We propose an alternative to this bottom-up approach inspired by design thinking: the XAI research community should adopt a top-down, user-focused perspective to ensure user relevance. We illustrate this with a relatively young subfield of XAI, Training Data Attribution (TDA). With the surge in TDA research and growing competition, the field risks repeating the same patterns of solutionism. We conducted a needfinding study with a diverse group of AI practitioners to identify potential user needs related to TDA. Through interviews (N=10) and a systematic survey (N=31), we uncovered new TDA tasks that are currently largely overlooked. We invite the TDA and XAI communities to consider these novel tasks and improve the user relevance of their research outcomes.

Quick and Accurate Affordance Learning

Infants learn actively in their environments, shaping their own learning curricula. They learn about their environments' affordances, that is, how local circumstances determine how their behavior can affect the environment. Here we model this type of behavior by means of a deep learning architecture. The architecture mediates between global cognitive map exploration and local affordance learning. Inference processes actively move the simulated agent towards regions where they expect affordance-related knowledge gain. We contrast three measures of uncertainty to guide this exploration: predicted uncertainty of a model, standard deviation between the means of several models (SD), and the Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) between several models. We show that the first measure gets fooled by aleatoric uncertainty inherent in the environment, while the two other measures focus learning on epistemic uncertainty. JSD exhibits the most balanced exploration strategy. From a computational perspective, our model suggests three key ingredients for coordinating the active generation of learning curricula: (1) Navigation behavior needs to be coordinated with local motor behavior for enabling active affordance learning. (2) Affordances need to be encoded locally for acquiring generalized knowledge. (3) Effective active affordance learning mechanisms should use density comparison techniques for estimating expected knowledge gain. Future work may seek collaborations with developmental psychology to model active play in children in more realistic scenarios.