Time Can Invalidate Algorithmic Recourse

Algorithmic Recourse (AR) aims to provide users with actionable steps to overturn unfavourable decisions made by machine learning predictors. However, these actions often take time to implement (e.g., getting a degree can take years), and their effects may vary as the world evolves. Thus, it is natural to ask for recourse that remains valid in a dynamic environment. In this paper, we study the robustness of algorithmic recourse over time by casting the problem through the lens of causality. We demonstrate theoretically and empirically that (even robust) causal AR methods can fail over time except in the - unlikely - case that the world is stationary. Even more critically, unless the world is fully deterministic, counterfactual AR cannot be solved optimally. To account for this, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm for temporal AR that explicitly accounts for time. Our simulations on synthetic and realistic datasets show how considering time produces more resilient solutions to potential trends in the data distribution.

Spurious Correlations in Concept Drift: Can Explanatory Interaction Help?

Long-running machine learning models face the issue of concept drift (CD), whereby the data distribution changes over time, compromising prediction performance. Updating the model requires detecting drift by monitoring the data and/or the model for unexpected changes. We show that, however, spurious correlations (SCs) can spoil the statistics tracked by detection algorithms. Motivated by this, we introduce ebc-exstream, a novel detector that leverages model explanations to identify potential SCs and human feedback to correct for them. It leverages an entropy-based heuristic to reduce the amount of necessary feedback, cutting annotation costs. Our preliminary experiments on artificially confounded data highlight the promise of ebc-exstream for reducing the impact of SCs on detection.

Perks and Pitfalls of Faithfulness in Regular, Self-Explainable and Domain Invariant GNNs

As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) become more pervasive, it becomes paramount to build robust tools for computing explanations of their predictions. A key desideratum is that these explanations are faithful, i.e., that they portray an accurate picture of the GNN's reasoning process. A number of different faithfulness metrics exist, begging the question of what faithfulness is exactly, and what its properties are. We begin by showing that existing metrics are not interchangeable -- i.e., explanations attaining high faithfulness according to one metric may be unfaithful according to others -- and can be systematically insensitive to important properties of the explanation, and suggest how to address these issues. We proceed to show that, surprisingly, optimizing for faithfulness is not always a sensible design goal. Specifically, we show that for injective regular GNN architectures, perfectly faithful explanations are completely uninformative. The situation is different for modular GNNs, such as self-explainable and domain-invariant architectures, where optimizing faithfulness does not compromise informativeness, and is also unexpectedly tied to out-of-distribution generalization.

A Benchmark Suite for Systematically Evaluating Reasoning Shortcuts

The advent of powerful neural classifiers has increased interest in problems that require both learning and reasoning. These problems are critical for understanding important properties of models, such as trustworthiness, generalization, interpretability, and compliance to safety and structural constraints. However, recent research observed that tasks requiring both learning and reasoning on background knowledge often suffer from reasoning shortcuts (RSs): predictors can solve the downstream reasoning task without associating the correct concepts to the high-dimensional data. To address this issue, we introduce rsbench, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to systematically evaluate the impact of RSs on models by providing easy access to highly customizable tasks affected by RSs. Furthermore, rsbench implements common metrics for evaluating concept quality and introduces novel formal verification procedures for assessing the presence of RSs in learning tasks. Using rsbench, we highlight that obtaining high quality concepts in both purely neural and neuro-symbolic models is a far-from-solved problem. rsbench is available at: https://unitn-sml.github.io/rsbench.

Semantic Loss Functions for Neuro-Symbolic Structured Prediction

Structured output prediction problems are ubiquitous in machine learning. The prominent approach leverages neural networks as powerful feature extractors, otherwise assuming the independence of the outputs. These outputs, however, jointly encode an object, e.g. a path in a graph, and are therefore related through the structure underlying the output space. We discuss the semantic loss, which injects knowledge about such structure, defined symbolically, into training by minimizing the network's violation of such dependencies, steering the network towards predicting distributions satisfying the underlying structure. At the same time, it is agnostic to the arrangement of the symbols, and depends only on the semantics expressed thereby, while also enabling efficient end-to-end training and inference. We also discuss key improvements and applications of the semantic loss. One limitations of the semantic loss is that it does not exploit the association of every data point with certain features certifying its membership in a target class. We should therefore prefer minimum-entropy distributions over valid structures, which we obtain by additionally minimizing the neuro-symbolic entropy. We empirically demonstrate the benefits of this more refined formulation. Moreover, the semantic loss is designed to be modular and can be combined with both discriminative and generative neural models. This is illustrated by integrating it into generative adversarial networks, yielding constrained adversarial networks, a novel class of deep generative models able to efficiently synthesize complex objects obeying the structure of the underlying domain.

Towards Logically Consistent Language Models via Probabilistic Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict themselves when prompted to reason about beliefs of the world. These problems are currently addressed with large scale fine-tuning or by delegating consistent reasoning to external tools. In this work, we strive for a middle ground and introduce a training objective based on principled probabilistic reasoning that teaches a LLM to be consistent with external knowledge in the form of a set of facts and rules. Fine-tuning with our loss on a limited set of facts enables our LLMs to be more logically consistent than previous baselines and allows them to extrapolate to unseen but semantically similar factual knowledge more systematically.

Learning To Guide Human Decision Makers With Vision-Language Models

There is increasing interest in developing AIs for assisting human decision-making in high-stakes tasks, such as medical diagnosis, for the purpose of improving decision quality and reducing cognitive strain. Mainstream approaches team up an expert with a machine learning model to which safer decisions are offloaded, thus letting the former focus on cases that demand their attention. his separation of responsibilities setup, however, is inadequate for high-stakes scenarios. On the one hand, the expert may end up over-relying on the machine's decisions due to anchoring bias, thus losing the human oversight that is increasingly being required by regulatory agencies to ensure trustworthy AI. On the other hand, the expert is left entirely unassisted on the (typically hardest) decisions on which the model abstained. As a remedy, we introduce learning to guide (LTG), an alternative framework in which - rather than taking control from the human expert - the machine provides guidance useful for decision making, and the human is entirely responsible for coming up with a decision. In order to ensure guidance is interpretable} and task-specific, we develop SLOG, an approach for turning any vision-language model into a capable generator of textual guidance by leveraging a modicum of human feedback. Our empirical evaluation highlights the promise of \method on a challenging, real-world medical diagnosis task.

BEARS Make Neuro-Symbolic Models Aware of their Reasoning Shortcuts

Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) predictors that conform to symbolic knowledge - encoding, e.g., safety constraints - can be affected by Reasoning Shortcuts (RSs): They learn concepts consistent with the symbolic knowledge by exploiting unintended semantics. RSs compromise reliability and generalization and, as we show in this paper, they are linked to NeSy models being overconfident about the predicted concepts. Unfortunately, the only trustworthy mitigation strategy requires collecting costly dense supervision over the concepts. Rather than attempting to avoid RSs altogether, we propose to ensure NeSy models are aware of the semantic ambiguity of the concepts they learn, thus enabling their users to identify and distrust low-quality concepts. Starting from three simple desiderata, we derive bears (BE Aware of Reasoning Shortcuts), an ensembling technique that calibrates the model's concept-level confidence without compromising prediction accuracy, thus encouraging NeSy architectures to be uncertain about concepts affected by RSs. We show empirically that bears improves RS-awareness of several state-of-the-art NeSy models, and also facilitates acquiring informative dense annotations for mitigation purposes.

Interpretability is in the Mind of the Beholder: A Causal Framework for Human-interpretable Representation Learning

Focus in Explainable AI is shifting from explanations defined in terms of low-level elements, such as input features, to explanations encoded in terms of interpretable concepts learned from data. How to reliably acquire such concepts is, however, still fundamentally unclear. An agreed-upon notion of concept interpretability is missing, with the result that concepts used by both post-hoc explainers and concept-based neural networks are acquired through a variety of mutually incompatible strategies. Critically, most of these neglect the human side of the problem: a representation is understandable only insofar as it can be understood by the human at the receiving end. The key challenge in Human-interpretable Representation Learning (HRL) is how to model and operationalize this human element. In this work, we propose a mathematical framework for acquiring interpretable representations suitable for both post-hoc explainers and concept-based neural networks. Our formalization of HRL builds on recent advances in causal representation learning and explicitly models a human stakeholder as an external observer. This allows us to derive a principled notion of alignment between the machine representation and the vocabulary of concepts understood by the human. In doing so, we link alignment and interpretability through a simple and intuitive name transfer game, and clarify the relationship between alignment and a well-known property of representations, namely disentanglment. We also show that alignment is linked to the issue of undesirable correlations among concepts, also known as concept leakage, and to content-style separation, all through a general information-theoretic reformulation of these properties. Our conceptualization aims to bridge the gap between the human and algorithmic sides of interpretability and establish a stepping stone for new research on human-interpretable representations.

How Faithful are Self-Explainable GNNs?

Self-explainable deep neural networks are a recent class of models that can output ante-hoc local explanations that are faithful to the model's reasoning, and as such represent a step forward toward filling the gap between expressiveness and interpretability. Self-explainable graph neural networks (GNNs) aim at achieving the same in the context of graph data. This begs the question: do these models fulfill their implicit guarantees in terms of faithfulness? In this extended abstract, we analyze the faithfulness of several self-explainable GNNs using different measures of faithfulness, identify several limitations -- both in the models themselves and in the evaluation metrics -- and outline possible ways forward.