Counterfactual explanations can be applied to algorithmic recourse, which is concerned with helping individuals in the real world overturn undesirable algorithmic decisions. They aim to provide explanations to opaque machine learning models. Not all generated points are equally faithful to the model, nor equally plausible. On the other hand, predictive uncertainty quantification is used to measure the degree of certainty a model has in its predictions. Previously, it has been shown that it is possible to generate more plausible counterfactual explanations utilising predictive uncertainty. This work investigates this further by using multiple models innately supporting uncertainty quantification and comparing the produced counterfactual explanations to those produced by the models' ordinary counter-part. Predictive uncertainty tends to enhance the plausibility of the counterfactuals on visual datasets. Furthermore, we are positive that predictive uncertainty correlates proportionally with plausibility. This correlation has important implications for both research and real-world applications, as it suggests that integrating uncertainty quantification in model development can improve the quality and trustworthiness of algorithmic explanations.

Counterfactual Explanations (CE) are essential for understanding the predictions of black-box models by suggesting minimal changes to input features that would alter the output. Despite their importance in Explainable AI (XAI), there is a lack of standardized metrics to assess the plausibility and faithfulness of these explanations. This paper reviews evaluation procedures in literature and proposes novel formal metrics for evaluating the plausibility and faithfulness of counterfactual explanations, addressing the existing limitations. Plausibility is defined as the coherence of explanations with the true data-generating process, while faithfulness refers to the accuracy of explanations in representing the model's reasoning. We discuss the shortcomings of existing evaluation procedures and metrics for measuring plausibility and faithfulness and consequently compare our proposed metrics with existing ones, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. The proposed metrics are then empirically validated through experiments across multiple models and datasets, demonstrating their model-agnostic nature and reliability. Our findings indicate that the proposed metrics provide a correct and reliable means to quantify the plausibility and faithfulness of counterfactual explanations, thereby allowing one to gauge their feasibility and trustworthiness consistently.

Adversarial Training has emerged as the most reliable technique to make neural networks robust to gradient-based adversarial perturbations on input data. Besides improving model robustness, preliminary evidence presents an interesting consequence of adversarial training -- increased explainability of model behaviour. Prior work has explored the effects of adversarial training on gradient stability and interpretability, as well as visual explainability of counterfactuals. Our work presents the first quantitative, empirical analysis of the impact of model robustness on model explainability by comparing the plausibility of faithful counterfactuals for both robust and standard networks. We seek to determine whether robust networks learn more plausible decision boundaries and representations of the data than regular models, and whether the strength of the adversary used to train robust models affects their explainability. Our finidngs indicate that robust networks for image data learn more explainable decision boundaries and representations of data than regular models, with more robust models producing more plausible counterfactuals. Robust models for tabular data, however, only conclusively exhibit this phenomenon along decision boundaries and not for its overall data representations, possibly due to its high robustness-accuracy trade-off and the difficulties associated with traditional adversarial training due to its innate properties. We believe our work can help guide future research towards improving the robustness of machine learning models keeping their explainability in mind.

In recent years, the need for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has become increasingly important as complex black-box models are used in critical applications. While many methods have been developed to interpret these models, there is also potential in enhancing the models themselves to improve their inherent explainability. This paper investigates various techniques aimed at improving the explainability of black-box models. Through a systematic literature review, these techniques are categorized, and their impact on predictive uncertainty, adversarial robustness, and generative capacity is analyzed to understand how these factors contribute to the overall explainability. The snowballing methodology is used for the systematic literature review, starting with papers retrieved from four databases: IEEExplore, Scopus, ArXiv, and the ACM Digital Library to form the initial set. This process continued with backward and forward snowballing through four iterations, resulting in a total of 50 papers reviewed. Only papers focused on improving model explainability are included in the review. Due to time limitations, additional search constraints are applied for feasibility. The initial set of papers is filtered to those published since 2013. These constraints and their possible impacts are considered when interpreting the results. Findings reveal that techniques such as Bayesian approaches and variational inference, adversarial robustness, model compression and distillation, uncertainty and ensembles, regularization, self-explaining models, and hybrid techniques are used for advancing model explainability. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of these techniques for future research.

Counterfactual explanations (CEs) can be used to gain useful insights into the behaviour of opaque classification models, allowing users to make an informed decision when trusting such systems. Assuming the CEs of a model are faithful (they well represent the inner workings of the model), an explainable model generates plausible CEs (i.e. CEs fitting the real-world distribution of the data). This raises the question of whether classifiers explicitly designed to model the distribution of the data, such as energy-based models, are inherently more explainable. This work focuses on the evaluation of joint energy-based models (JEMs) in combination with the Energy-Constrained Conformal Counterfactuals (ECCCo) generator, with the goal of identifying if the generative capability of a model influences its explainability. Since ECCCo has been designed specifically to generate more faithful CEs, it makes it possible to use the CEs plausibility as a proxy of the model explainability. Two experiments have been performed to evaluate the effect of variations of generative capability within the same JEM architecture and the difference between JEMs and classically trained classifiers. Despite the experiments not having established a clear correlation between generative capability and explainability of a model, various research avenues are still open to explore in future works

This research delves into the exploration of translation methods between affect representation schemes within the domain of text content analysis. We assess their performance on various affect analysis tasks while concurrently developing a robust evaluation framework. Furthermore, we collect annotated datasets and take into account crucial contextual and individual factors. Ultimately, our goal is to contribute to the advancement of powerful and sophisticated tools for affect analysis. We believe a successful automated translation will aid in achieving a more comprehensive and rounded understanding of affect and further research in different fields, such as psychology and sociology.

Continuous affective self-reports are intrusive and expensive to acquire, forcing researchers to use alternative labels for the construction of their predictive models. The most predominantly used labels in literature are continuous perceived affective labels obtained using external annotators. However an increasing body of research indicates that the relation between expressed emotion and experienced emotion might not be as apparent as previously assumed. Retrospective self-reports provided by participants do capture experienced emotion, but models applied on these labels suffer from the lack of continuous annotations during training. In this work, we aim to answer whether this lack of temporal information can be remedied by using continuous external annotations as proxies for experienced emotion over time. Furthermore, we investigate whether weakly-supervised models can generate accurate continuous annotations to reduce the annotation burden for large datasets. Our results indicate that external annotation sequences bear little significant information for the prediction of self-reports. However, forcing models to reflect changes in external annotations by training models in a multitask fashion improves model performance, suggesting that such temporal supervision helps models to distinguish relevant segments in input data. Besides this, we find that weakly-supervised models can to a certain extent capture changes over time, but in general yield poor results compared to fully-supervised models.