No Arabic abstract
Machine learning models are increasingly integrated into societally critical applications such as recidivism prediction and medical diagnosis, thanks to their superior predictive power. In these applications, however, full automation is often not desired due to ethical and legal concerns. The research community has thus ventured into developing interpretable methods that explain machine predictions. While these explanations are meant to assist humans in understanding machine predictions and thereby allowing humans to make better decisions, this hypothesis is not supported in many recent studies. To improve human decision-making with AI assistance, we propose future directions for closing the gap between the efficacy of explanations and improvement in human performance.
Explainability of AI systems is critical for users to take informed actions and hold systems accountable. While opening the opaque box is important, understanding who opens the box can govern if the Human-AI interaction is effective. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-methods study of how two different groups of whos--people with and without a background in AI--perceive different types of AI explanations. These groups were chosen to look at how disparities in AI backgrounds can exacerbate the creator-consumer gap. We quantitatively share what the perceptions are along five dimensions: confidence, intelligence, understandability, second chance, and friendliness. Qualitatively, we highlight how the AI background influences each groups interpretations and elucidate why the differences might exist through the lenses of appropriation and cognitive heuristics. We find that (1) both groups had unwarranted faith in numbers, to different extents and for different reasons, (2) each group found explanatory values in different explanations that went beyond the usage we designed them for, and (3) each group had different requirements of what counts as humanlike explanations. Using our findings, we discuss potential negative consequences such as harmful manipulation of user trust and propose design interventions to mitigate them. By bringing conscious awareness to how and why AI backgrounds shape perceptions of potential creators and consumers in XAI, our work takes a formative step in advancing a pluralistic Human-centered Explainable AI discourse.
To support human decision making with machine learning models, we often need to elucidate patterns embedded in the models that are unsalient, unknown, or counterintuitive to humans. While existing approaches focus on explaining machine predictions with real-time assistance, we explore model-driven tutorials to help humans understand these patterns in a training phase. We consider both tutorials with guidelines from scientific papers, analogous to current practices of science communication, and automatically selected examples from training data with explanations. We use deceptive review detection as a testbed and conduct large-scale, randomized human-subject experiments to examine the effectiveness of such tutorials. We find that tutorials indeed improve human performance, with and without real-time assistance. In particular, although deep learning provides superior predictive performance than simple models, tutorials and explanations from simple models are more useful to humans. Our work suggests future directions for human-centered tutorials and explanations towards a synergy between humans and AI.
As the field of Spoken Dialogue Systems and Conversational AI grows, so does the need for tools and environments that abstract away implementation details in order to expedite the development process, lower the barrier of entry to the field, and offer a common test-bed for new ideas. In this paper, we present Plato, a flexible Conversational AI platform written in Python that supports any kind of conversational agent architecture, from standard architectures to architectures with jointly-trained components, single- or multi-party interactions, and offline or online training of any conversational agent component. Plato has been designed to be easy to understand and debug and is agnostic to the underlying learning frameworks that train each component.
As AI continues to advance, human-AI teams are inevitable. However, progress in AI is routinely measured in isolation, without a human in the loop. It is crucial to benchmark progress in AI, not just in isolation, but also in terms of how it translates to helping humans perform certain tasks, i.e., the performance of human-AI teams. In this work, we design a cooperative game - GuessWhich - to measure human-AI team performance in the specific context of the AI being a visual conversational agent. GuessWhich involves live interaction between the human and the AI. The AI, which we call ALICE, is provided an image which is unseen by the human. Following a brief description of the image, the human questions ALICE about this secret image to identify it from a fixed pool of images. We measure performance of the human-ALICE team by the number of guesses it takes the human to correctly identify the secret image after a fixed number of dialog rounds with ALICE. We compare performance of the human-ALICE teams for t
People supported by AI-powered decision support tools frequently overrely on the AI: they accept an AIs suggestion even when that suggestion is wrong. Adding explanations to the AI decisions does not appear to reduce the overreliance and some studies suggest that it might even increase it. Informed by the dual-process theory of cognition, we posit that people rarely engage analytically with each individual AI recommendation and explanation, and instead develop general heuristics about whether and when to follow the AI suggestions. Building on prior research on medical decision-making, we designed three cognitive forcing interventions to compel people to engage more thoughtfully with the AI-generated explanations. We conducted an experiment (N=199), in which we compared our three cognitive forcing designs to two simple explainable AI approaches and to a no-AI baseline. The results demonstrate that cognitive forcing significantly reduced overreliance compared to the simple explainable AI approaches. However, there was a trade-off: people assigned the least favorable subjective ratings to the designs that reduced the overreliance the most. To audit our work for intervention-generated inequalities, we investigated whether our interventions benefited equally people with different levels of Need for Cognition (i.e., motivation to engage in effortful mental activities). Our results show that, on average, cognitive forcing interventions benefited participants higher in Need for Cognition more. Our research suggests that human cognitive motivation moderates the effectiveness of explainable AI solutions.