Georges Hattab

Zhenxiao Yin, Xiaobing Dai, Zewen Yang et al.

The growing demand for accurate control in varying and unknown environments has sparked a corresponding increase in the requirements for power supply components, including permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs). To infer the unknown part of the system, machine learning techniques are widely employed, especially Gaussian process regression (GPR) due to its flexibility of continuous system modeling and its guaranteed performance. For practical implementation, distributed GPR is adopted to alleviate the high computational complexity. However, the study of distributed GPR from a control perspective remains an open problem. In this paper, a control-aware optimal aggregation strategy of distributed GPR for PMSMs is proposed based on the Lyapunov stability theory. This strategy exclusively leverages the posterior mean, thereby obviating the need for computationally intensive calculations associated with posterior variance in alternative approaches. Moreover, the straightforward calculation process of our proposed strategy lends itself to seamless implementation in high-frequency PMSM control. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated in the simulations.

Aleksandar Anžel, Zewen Yang, Georges Hattab

While the polar system may lack the universal familiarity of its Cartesian counterpart, it remains indispensable for certain tasks. Summary polar diagrams, such as Taylor and mutual information diagrams, address tasks like discovering relationships, visualizing data similarity, and quantifying correspondence. Although these diagrams are invaluable tools for uncovering data relationships, their polar nature can hinder intuitiveness and lead to issues like overplotting. We present a hybrid approach that combines overview+detail, aggregation, interactive filtering, Cartesian linking, and small multiples to enhance the clarity, comprehensiveness, and functionality of summary polar diagrams. We performed a user study to assess this approach's effectiveness, noting comparable response times among participants. Additionally, three domain experts with varying visualization experience reviewed an implemented solution applying summary polar diagrams to climate, data science (novel), and machine learning, refining the approach prior to the user study. The findings underscore the versatility of our approach in enhancing comprehension, accessibility, and utility.

Akshat Dubey, Aleksandar Anžel, Bahar İlgen et al.

Recent advances in deep learning have led to its widespread adoption across diverse domains, including medical imaging. This progress is driven by increasingly sophisticated model architectures, such as ResNets, Vision Transformers, and Hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks, that offer enhanced performance at the cost of greater complexity. This complexity often compromises model explainability and interpretability. SHAP has emerged as a prominent method for providing interpretable visualizations that aid domain experts in understanding model predictions. However, SHAP explanations can be unstable and unreliable in the presence of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. In this study, we address this challenge by using Dirichlet posterior sampling and Dempster-Shafer theory to quantify the uncertainty that arises from these unstable explanations in medical imaging applications. The framework uses a belief, plausible, and fusion map approach alongside statistical quantitative analysis to produce quantification of uncertainty in SHAP. Furthermore, we evaluated our framework on three medical imaging datasets with varying class distributions, image qualities, and modality types which introduces noise due to varying image resolutions and modality-specific aspect covering the examples from pathology, ophthalmology, and radiology, introducing significant epistemic uncertainty.

Ana Paula Gomes Ferreira, Aleksandar Anžel, Izabel Oliva Marcilio de Souza et al.

Case definitions are essential for effectively communicating public health threats. However, the absence of a standardized, machine-readable format poses significant challenges to interoperability, epidemiological research, the exchange of qualitative data, and the effective application of computational analysis methods, including artificial intelligence (AI). This complicates comparisons and collaborations across organizations and regions, limits data integration, and hinders technological innovation in public health. To address these issues, we propose the first open, machine-readable format for representing case and syndrome definitions. Additionally, we introduce the first comprehensive dataset of standardized case definitions and tools to convert existing human-readable definitions into machine-readable formats. We also provide an accessible online platform for browsing, analyzing, and contributing new definitions, available at https://opensyndrome.org. The Open Syndrome Definition format enables consistent, scalable use of case definitions across systems, unlocking AI's potential to strengthen public health preparedness and response. The source code for the format can be found at https://github.com/OpenSyndrome/schema under the MIT license.

Vincent Schilling, Akshat Dubey, Georges Hattab

Peptide classification tasks, such as predicting toxicity and HIV inhibition, are fundamental to bioinformatics and drug discovery. Traditional approaches rely heavily on handcrafted encodings of one-dimensional (1D) peptide sequences, which can limit generalizability across tasks and datasets. Recently, protein language models (PLMs), such as ESM-2 and ESMFold, have demonstrated strong predictive performance. However, they face two critical challenges. First, fine-tuning is computationally costly. Second, their complex latent representations hinder interpretability for domain experts. Additionally, many frameworks have been developed for specific types of peptide classification, lacking generalization. These limitations restrict the ability to connect model predictions to biologically relevant motifs and structural properties. To address these limitations, we present PepTriX, a novel framework that integrates one dimensional (1D) sequence embeddings and three-dimensional (3D) structural features via a graph attention network enhanced with contrastive training and cross-modal co-attention. PepTriX automatically adapts to diverse datasets, producing task-specific peptide vectors while retaining biological plausibility. After evaluation by domain experts, we found that PepTriX performs remarkably well across multiple peptide classification tasks and provides interpretable insights into the structural and biophysical motifs that drive predictions. Thus, PepTriX offers both predictive robustness and interpretable validation, bridging the gap between performance-driven peptide-level models (PLMs) and domain-level understanding in peptide research.

Georges Hattab

Current discourse on Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics, dominated by "trustworthy" and "responsible" AI, overlooks a more fundamental human-computer interaction (HCI) crisis: the erosion of human agency. This paper argues that the primary challenge of high-stakes AI systems is not trust, but the preservation of human causal control. We posit that "bad AI" will function as "bad UI," a metaphor for catastrophic interface failures that misrepresent system state and lead to human error. Applying Marshall McLuhan's media theory, AI can be framed as a technology of "augmentation" that simultaneously "amputates" the user's direct perception of causality. This places the interface as the critical locus where a "double uncertainty"--that of the human user and that of the probabilistic model--must be mediated. We critique current Explainable AI (XAI) for its correlational focus and failure to represent uncertainty. We conclude by proposing a rigorous, nested Causal-Agency Framework (CAF) that integrates causal models, uncertainty quantification, and human-centered evaluation to restore agency at the interface.

Zewen Yang, Xiaobing Dai, Akshat Dubey et al.

This paper introduces an innovative approach to enhance distributed cooperative learning using Gaussian process (GP) regression in multi-agent systems (MASs). The key contribution of this work is the development of an elective learning algorithm, namely prior-aware elective distributed GP (Pri-GP), which empowers agents with the capability to selectively request predictions from neighboring agents based on their trustworthiness. The proposed Pri-GP effectively improves individual prediction accuracy, especially in cases where the prior knowledge of an agent is incorrect. Moreover, it eliminates the need for computationally intensive variance calculations for determining aggregation weights in distributed GP. Furthermore, we establish a prediction error bound within the Pri-GP framework, ensuring the reliability of predictions, which is regarded as a crucial property in safety-critical MAS applications.

Zewen Yang, Songbo Dong, Armin Lederer et al.

This work presents an innovative learning-based approach to tackle the tracking control problem of Euler-Lagrange multi-agent systems with partially unknown dynamics operating under switching communication topologies. The approach leverages a correlation-aware cooperative algorithm framework built upon Gaussian process regression, which adeptly captures inter-agent correlations for uncertainty predictions. A standout feature is its exceptional efficiency in deriving the aggregation weights achieved by circumventing the computationally intensive posterior variance calculations. Through Lyapunov stability analysis, the distributed control law ensures bounded tracking errors with high probability. Simulation experiments validate the protocol's efficacy in effectively managing complex scenarios, establishing it as a promising solution for robust tracking control in multi-agent systems characterized by uncertain dynamics and dynamic communication structures.

Akshat Dubey, Zewen Yang, Georges Hattab

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly advancing and radically impacting everyday life, driven by the increasing availability of computing power. Despite this trend, the adoption of AI in real-world healthcare is still limited. One of the main reasons is the trustworthiness of AI models and the potential hesitation of domain experts with model predictions. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques aim to address these issues. However, explainability can mean different things to people with different backgrounds, expertise, and goals. To address the target audience with diverse needs, we develop storytelling XAI. In this research, we have developed an approach that combines multi-task distillation with interpretability techniques to enable audience-centric explainability. Using multi-task distillation allows the model to exploit the relationships between tasks, potentially improving interpretability as each task supports the other leading to an enhanced interpretability from the perspective of a domain expert. The distillation process allows us to extend this research to large deep models that are highly complex. We focus on both model-agnostic and model-specific methods of interpretability, supported by textual justification of the results in healthcare through our use case. Our methods increase the trust of both the domain experts and the machine learning experts to enable a responsible AI.

Xiaobing Dai, Zewen Yang, Mengtian Xu et al.

Consensus control in multi-agent systems has received significant attention and practical implementation across various domains. However, managing consensus control under unknown dynamics remains a significant challenge for control design due to system uncertainties and environmental disturbances. This paper presents a novel learning-based distributed control law, augmented by an auxiliary dynamics. Gaussian processes are harnessed to compensate for the unknown components of the multi-agent system. For continuous enhancement in predictive performance of Gaussian process model, a data-efficient online learning strategy with a decentralized event-triggered mechanism is proposed. Furthermore, the control performance of the proposed approach is ensured via the Lyapunov theory, based on a probabilistic guarantee for prediction error bounds. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed learning-based controller, a comparative analysis is conducted, contrasting it with both conventional distributed control laws and offline learning methodologies.

Akshat Dubey, Aleksandar Anžel, Georges Hattab

The field of health informatics has been profoundly influenced by the development of random forest models, which have led to significant advances in the interpretability of feature interactions. These models are characterized by their robustness to overfitting and parallelization, making them particularly useful in this domain. However, the increasing number of features and estimators in random forests can prevent domain experts from accurately interpreting global feature interactions, thereby compromising trust and regulatory compliance. A method called the surrogate interpretability graph has been developed to address this issue. It uses graphs and mixed-integer linear programming to analyze and visualize feature interactions. This improves their interpretability by visualizing the feature usage per decision-feature-interaction table and the most dominant hierarchical decision feature interactions for predictions. The implementation of a surrogate interpretable graph enhances global interpretability, which is critical for such a high-stakes domain.

Bahar İlgen, Georges Hattab

Text simplification is essential for making public health information accessible to diverse populations, including those with limited health literacy. However, commonly used evaluation metrics in Natural Language Processing (NLP), such as BLEU, FKGL, and SARI, mainly capture surface-level features and fail to account for human-centered qualities like clarity, trustworthiness, tone, cultural relevance, and actionability. This limitation is particularly critical in high-stakes health contexts, where communication must be not only simple but also usable, respectful, and trustworthy. To address this gap, we propose the Human-Centered Readability Score (HCRS), a five-dimensional evaluation framework grounded in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and health communication research. HCRS integrates automatic measures with structured human feedback to capture the relational and contextual aspects of readability. We outline the framework, discuss its integration into participatory evaluation workflows, and present a protocol for empirical validation. This work aims to advance the evaluation of health text simplification beyond surface metrics, enabling NLP systems that align more closely with diverse users' needs, expectations, and lived experiences.

Ebenezer Awotoro, Chisom Ezekannagha, Florian Schwarz et al.

Structural biology has made significant progress in determining membrane proteins, leading to a remarkable increase in the number of available structures in dedicated databases. The inherent complexity of membrane protein structures, coupled with challenges such as missing data, inconsistencies, and computational barriers from disparate sources, underscores the need for improved database integration. To address this gap, we present MetaMP, a framework that unifies membrane-protein databases within a web application and uses machine learning for classification. MetaMP improves data quality by enriching metadata, offering a user-friendly interface, and providing eight interactive views for streamlined exploration. MetaMP was effective across tasks of varying difficulty, demonstrating advantages across different levels without compromising speed or accuracy, according to user evaluations. Moreover, MetaMP supports essential functions such as structure classification and outlier detection. We present three practical applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in membrane protein research: predicting transmembrane segments, reconciling legacy databases, and classifying structures with explainable AI support. In a validation focused on statistics, MetaMP resolved 77% of data discrepancies and accurately predicted the class of newly identified membrane proteins 98% of the time and overtook expert curation. Altogether, MetaMP is a much-needed resource that harmonizes current knowledge and empowers AI-driven exploration of membrane-protein architecture.

Akshat Dubey, Aleksandar Anžel, Bahar İlgen et al.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), have become essential tools for interpreting complex ensemble tree-based models, especially in high-stakes domains such as healthcare analytics. However, SHAP values are usually treated as point estimates, which disregards the inherent and ubiquitous uncertainty in predictive models and data. This uncertainty has two primary sources: aleatoric and epistemic. The aleatoric uncertainty, which reflects the irreducible noise in the data. The epistemic uncertainty, which arises from a lack of data. In this work, we propose an approach for decomposing uncertainty in SHAP values into aleatoric, epistemic, and entanglement components. This approach integrates Dempster-Shafer evidence theory and hypothesis sampling via Dirichlet processes over tree ensembles. We validate the method across three real-world use cases with descriptive statistical analyses that provide insight into the nature of epistemic uncertainty embedded in SHAP explanations. The experimentations enable to provide more comprehensive understanding of the reliability and interpretability of SHAP-based attributions. This understanding can guide the development of robust decision-making processes and the refinement of models in high-stakes applications. Through our experiments with multiple datasets, we concluded that features with the highest SHAP values are not necessarily the most stable. This epistemic uncertainty can be reduced through better, more representative data and following appropriate or case-desired model development techniques. Tree-based models, especially bagging, facilitate the effective quantification of epistemic uncertainty.

Bahar İlgen, Akshat Dubey, Georges Hattab

Ensuring transparency and trust in AI-driven public health and biomedical sciences systems requires more than accurate predictions-it demands explanations that are clear, contextual, and socially accountable. While explainable AI (XAI) has advanced in areas like feature attribution and model interpretability, most methods still lack the structure and adaptability needed for diverse health stakeholders, including clinicians, policymakers, and the general public. We introduce PHAX-a Public Health Argumentation and eXplainability framework-that leverages structured argumentation to generate human-centered explanations for AI outputs. PHAX is a multi-layer architecture combining defeasible reasoning, adaptive natural language techniques, and user modeling to produce context-aware, audience-specific justifications. More specifically, we show how argumentation enhances explainability by supporting AI-driven decision-making, justifying recommendations, and enabling interactive dialogues across user types. We demonstrate the applicability of PHAX through use cases such as medical term simplification, patient-clinician communication, and policy justification. In particular, we show how simplification decisions can be modeled as argument chains and personalized based on user expertise-enhancing both interpretability and trust. By aligning formal reasoning methods with communicative demands, PHAX contributes to a broader vision of transparent, human-centered AI in public health.

Akshat Dubey, Zewen Yang, Georges Hattab

The growing AI field faces trust, transparency, fairness, and discrimination challenges. Despite the need for new regulations, there is a mismatch between regulatory science and AI, preventing a consistent framework. A five-layer nested model for AI design and validation aims to address these issues and streamline AI application design and validation, improving fairness, trust, and AI adoption. This model aligns with regulations, addresses AI practitioner's daily challenges, and offers prescriptive guidance for determining appropriate evaluation approaches by identifying unique validity threats. We have three recommendations motivated by this model: authors should distinguish between layers when claiming contributions to clarify the specific areas in which the contribution is made and to avoid confusion, authors should explicitly state upstream assumptions to ensure that the context and limitations of their AI system are clearly understood, AI venues should promote thorough testing and validation of AI systems and their compliance with regulatory requirements.