C. Bayan Bruss

Isha Hameed, Samuel Sharpe, Daniel Barcklow et al.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods lack ground truth. In its place, method developers have relied on axioms to determine desirable properties for their explanations' behavior. For high stakes uses of machine learning that require explainability, it is not sufficient to rely on axioms as the implementation, or its usage, can fail to live up to the ideal. As a result, there exists active research on validating the performance of XAI methods. The need for validation is especially magnified in domains with a reliance on XAI. A procedure frequently used to assess their utility, and to some extent their fidelity, is an ablation study. By perturbing the input variables in rank order of importance, the goal is to assess the sensitivity of the model's performance. Perturbing important variables should correlate with larger decreases in measures of model capability than perturbing less important features. While the intent is clear, the actual implementation details have not been studied rigorously for tabular data. Using five datasets, three XAI methods, four baselines, and three perturbations, we aim to show 1) how varying perturbations and adding simple guardrails can help to avoid potentially flawed conclusions, 2) how treatment of categorical variables is an important consideration in both post-hoc explainability and ablation studies, and 3) how to identify useful baselines for XAI methods and viable perturbations for ablation studies.

Wenqing Zheng, Noah Fatsi, Daniel Barcklow et al.

Recent advances in recommendation with large language models (LLMs) often rely on either commonsense augmentation at the item-category level or implicit intent modeling on existing knowledge graphs. However, such approaches struggle to capture grounded user intents and to handle sparsity and cold-start scenarios. In this work, we present LLM-based Intent Knowledge Graph Recommender (IKGR), a novel framework that constructs an intent-centric knowledge graph where both users and items are explicitly linked to intent nodes extracted by a tuning-free, RAG-guided LLM pipeline. By grounding intents in external knowledge sources and user profiles, IKGR canonically represents what a user seeks and what an item satisfies as first-class entities. To alleviate sparsity, we further introduce a mutual-intent connectivity densification strategy, which shortens semantic paths between users and long-tail items without requiring cross-graph fusion. Finally, a lightweight GNN layer is employed on top of the intent-enhanced graph to produce recommendation signals with low latency. Extensive experiments on public and enterprise datasets demonstrate that IKGR consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly on cold-start and long-tail slices, while remaining efficient through a fully offline LLM pipeline.

Brian Barr, Matthew R. Harrington, Samuel Sharpe et al.

Counterfactual explanations represent the minimal change to a data sample that alters its predicted classification, typically from an unfavorable initial class to a desired target class. Counterfactuals help answer questions such as "what needs to change for this application to get accepted for a loan?". A number of recently proposed approaches to counterfactual generation give varying definitions of "plausible" counterfactuals and methods to generate them. However, many of these methods are computationally intensive and provide unconvincing explanations. Here we introduce SharpShooter, a method for binary classification that starts by creating a projected version of the input that classifies as the target class. Counterfactual candidates are then generated in latent space on the interpolation line between the input and its projection. We then demonstrate that our framework translates core characteristics of a sample to its counterfactual through the use of learned representations. Furthermore, we show that SharpShooter is competitive across common quality metrics on tabular and image datasets while being orders of magnitude faster than two comparable methods and excels at measures of realism, making it well-suited for high velocity machine learning applications which require timely explanations.