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A Practical Tutorial on Explainable AI Techniques

Bennetot, A. ORCID: 0000-0001-8232-8728, Donadello, I. ORCID: 0000-0002-0701-5729, El Qadi El Haouari, A. ORCID: 0000-0002-7296-1252 , Dragoni, M. ORCID: 0000-0003-0380-6571, Frossard, T. ORCID: 0009-0005-6388-5672, Wagner, B. ORCID: 0009-0002-6747-1862, Sarranti, A. ORCID: 0000-0002-1085-8428, Tulli, S. ORCID: 0000-0002-6826-370X, Trocan, M. ORCID: 0000-0001-6241-0126, Chatila, R. ORCID: 0000-0001-7822-0634, Holzinger, A. ORCID: 0000-0002-6786-5194, d'Avila Garcez, A. S. ORCID: 0000-0001-7375-9518 & Díaz-Rodríguez, N. ORCID: 0000-0003-3362-9326 (2025). A Practical Tutorial on Explainable AI Techniques. ACM Computing Surveys, 57(2), pp. 1-44. doi: 10.1145/3670685

Abstract

The past years have been characterized by an upsurge in opaque automatic decision support systems, such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Although DNNs have great generalization and prediction abilities, it is difficult to obtain detailed explanations for their behavior. As opaque Machine Learning models are increasingly being employed to make important predictions in critical domains, there is a danger of creating and using decisions that are not justifiable or legitimate. Therefore, there is a general agreement on the importance of endowing DNNs with explainability. EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques can serve to verify and certify model outputs and enhance them with desirable notions such as trustworthiness, accountability, transparency, and fairness. This guide is intended to be the go-to handbook for anyone with a computer science background aiming to obtain an intuitive insight from Machine Learning models accompanied by explanations out-of-the-box. The article aims to rectify the lack of a practical XAI guide by applying XAI techniques, in particular, day-to-day models, datasets and use-cases. In each chapter, the reader will find a description of the proposed method as well as one or several examples of use with Python notebooks. These can be easily modified to be applied to specific applications. We also explain what the prerequisites are for using each technique, what the user will learn about them, and which tasks they are aimed at.

Publication Type: Article
Additional Information: This article has been published in its final form in ACM Computing Surveys and it's available online at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3670685
Publisher Keywords: Explainable artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, interpretability, shapley, Grad-CAM, layer-wise relevance propagation, DiCE, counterfactual explanations, TS4NLE, neural-symbolic learning
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments: School of Science & Technology
School of Science & Technology > Computer Science
SWORD Depositor:
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