Michael Lognoul

Francesco Sovrano, Giulia Vilone, Michael Lognoul

Explainable AI (XAI) has evolved in response to expectations and regulations, such as the EU AI Act, which introduces regulatory requirements on AI-powered systems. However, a persistent gap remains between existing XAI methods and society's legal requirements, leaving practitioners without clear guidance on how to approach compliance in the EU market. To bridge this gap, we study model-agnostic XAI methods and relate their interpretability features to the requirements of the AI Act. We then propose a qualitative-to-quantitative scoring framework: qualitative expert assessments of XAI properties are aggregated into a regulation-specific compliance score. This helps practitioners identify when XAI solutions may support legal explanation requirements while highlighting technical issues that require further research and regulatory clarification.

Francesco Sovrano, Michael Lognoul, Giulia Vilone

Significant investment and development have gone into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical and healthcare applications, leading to advanced control systems in medical technology. However, the opacity of AI systems raises concerns about essential characteristics needed in such sensitive applications, like transparency and trustworthiness. Our study addresses these concerns by investigating a process for selecting the most adequate Explainable AI (XAI) methods to comply with the explanation requirements of key EU regulations in the context of smart bioelectronics for medical devices. The adopted methodology starts with categorising smart devices by their control mechanisms (open-loop, closed-loop, and semi-closed-loop systems) and delving into their technology. Then, we analyse these regulations to define their explainability requirements for the various devices and related goals. Simultaneously, we classify XAI methods by their explanatory objectives. This allows for matching legal explainability requirements with XAI explanatory goals and determining the suitable XAI algorithms for achieving them. Our findings provide a nuanced understanding of which XAI algorithms align better with EU regulations for different types of medical devices. We demonstrate this through practical case studies on different neural implants, from chronic disease management to advanced prosthetics. This study fills a crucial gap in aligning XAI applications in bioelectronics with stringent provisions of EU regulations. It provides a practical framework for developers and researchers, ensuring their AI innovations advance healthcare technology and adhere to legal and ethical standards.

Adrien Bibal, Michael Lognoul, Alexandre de Streel et al.

The requirements on explainability imposed by European laws and their implications for machine learning (ML) models are not always clear. In that perspective, our research analyzes explanation obligations imposed for private and public decision-making, and how they can be implemented by machine learning techniques.