As artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models become integral to network operations, their lack of transparency poses a significant barrier to operator trust. Existing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques often fail to bridge this gap for non-specialists, producing technical outputs that are difficult to translate into actionable insights.
arXiv:2606. 10942v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models become integral to network operations, their lack of transparency poses a significant barrier to operator trust.
By Kiarash Rezaei, Omran Ayoub, Sebastian Troia, Francesco Lelli, Paolo Monti, Carlos Natalino
arXiv:2606. 28065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding model predictions is essential for physical applications, where outputs often inform safety-critical decisions, such as structural load assessment, weather warnings, and clinical diagnosis.
By Joshua Stiller, Santo M. A. R. Thies, Felix Czaja, Eyke H\"ullermeier
arXiv:2606. 22314v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Path-based attribution methods such as Integrated Gradients (IG) are widely adopted for their strong axiomatic properties and effectiveness in attributing model predictions to input features by integrating gradients along a path from a baseline to the input.
By Soyeon Kim, Kyowoon Lee, Jaesik Choi
arXiv:2607. 09502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explaining machine-learning models is increasingly important for decision-making and consumer trust, yet it is widely believed to come at a cost: existing Explainable AI (XAI) methods suffer from a persistent accuracy-explainability trade-off.
By Pan Li
Path-based attribution methods such as Integrated Gradients (IG) are widely adopted for their strong axiomatic properties and effectiveness in attributing model predictions to input features by integrating gradients along a path from a baseline to the input. However, the choice of the attribution path largely affects the quality of explanations, and existing approaches rely on fixed or hand-crafted paths that often produce noisy or distorted attributions.
The paper proposes a new evaluation test for explanation methods: if an explanation accurately captures how a model uses its features, one should be able to reconstruct the model’s predictions from it. The authors convert explanations into predictors by summing feature effects and assess how well these predictors reproduce the model on unseen data, without any fitting. They apply this test to partial dependence plots, accumulated local effects, SHAP, and LIME across multiple datasets and model families, showing that the best method depends on feature dependence and that some existing quality metrics can favor flawed explanations.
By Jacob Selb{\ae}k, Hugo L. Hammer
ProToMEx is a new explainability framework that uses Probabilistic Topic Models to learn latent topics representing high‑level reasons behind a classifier’s decisions, moving beyond simple feature attribution. It provides both global and local explanations, revealing multiple co‑existing reasons for individual predictions. Empirical results show that ProToMEx achieves comparable fidelity to SHAP and LIME while being 30–40× faster on standard tabular and synthetic datasets.
By Athina Georgara, Adarsh Valoor, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn
arXiv:2608.21803v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As machine learning (ML) models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, explainable AI (XAI) methods like SHAP and LIME have become es...
By Maraz Mia, Shovan Roy, Mir Mehedi A. Pritom, Maanak Gupta
arXiv:2606. 10347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly used in critical domains, where both predictions and their associated confidence levels influence important decisions.
By Vin\'icius Peixoto Chagas, Carlos Henrique Leit\~ao Cavalcante, Thiago Alves Rocha
arXiv:2605. 27618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the wide use of explainability techniques to attempt to understand the behavior of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the generated explanations may not always be reliable.
By Tom\'as Pereira, Jo\~ao Vitorino, Eva Maia, Isabel Pra\c{c}a
The paper introduces a synthetic ground‑truth framework for evaluating explainable AI (XAI) methods, addressing the lack of reliable evaluation procedures. By using controlled interventions to create datasets where the importance of input components is known, the framework generates ground‑truth explanations that align with the model’s actual decision process. The authors apply this approach to binary images, tabular data, and time series, and find that nine popular XAI methods exhibit significant limitations, underscoring the need for intervention‑based benchmarks.
By Miquel Mir\'o-Nicolau, Francesco Spinnato, Riccardo Guidotti