Sami Mourad

Vijay Arya, Rachel K. E. Bellamy, Pin-Yu Chen et al.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms become increasingly prevalent in society, multiple stakeholders are calling for these algorithms to provide explanations. At the same time, these stakeholders, whether they be affected citizens, government regulators, domain experts, or system developers, have different explanation needs. To address these needs, in 2019, we created AI Explainability 360 (Arya et al. 2020), an open source software toolkit featuring ten diverse and state-of-the-art explainability methods and two evaluation metrics. This paper examines the impact of the toolkit with several case studies, statistics, and community feedback. The different ways in which users have experienced AI Explainability 360 have resulted in multiple types of impact and improvements in multiple metrics, highlighted by the adoption of the toolkit by the independent LF AI & Data Foundation. The paper also describes the flexible design of the toolkit, examples of its use, and the significant educational material and documentation available to its users.

Vijay Arya, Rachel K. E. Bellamy, Pin-Yu Chen et al.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms make further inroads into society, calls are increasing from multiple stakeholders for these algorithms to explain their outputs. At the same time, these stakeholders, whether they be affected citizens, government regulators, domain experts, or system developers, present different requirements for explanations. Toward addressing these needs, we introduce AI Explainability 360 (http://aix360.mybluemix.net/), an open-source software toolkit featuring eight diverse and state-of-the-art explainability methods and two evaluation metrics. Equally important, we provide a taxonomy to help entities requiring explanations to navigate the space of explanation methods, not only those in the toolkit but also in the broader literature on explainability. For data scientists and other users of the toolkit, we have implemented an extensible software architecture that organizes methods according to their place in the AI modeling pipeline. We also discuss enhancements to bring research innovations closer to consumers of explanations, ranging from simplified, more accessible versions of algorithms, to tutorials and an interactive web demo to introduce AI explainability to different audiences and application domains. Together, our toolkit and taxonomy can help identify gaps where more explainability methods are needed and provide a platform to incorporate them as they are developed.

Dong-Ki Kim, Miao Liu, Shayegan Omidshafiei et al.

Collective learning can be greatly enhanced when agents effectively exchange knowledge with their peers. In particular, recent work studying agents that learn to teach other teammates has demonstrated that action advising accelerates team-wide learning. However, the prior work has simplified the learning of advising policies by using simple function approximations and only considered advising with primitive (low-level) actions, limiting the scalability of learning and teaching to complex domains. This paper introduces a novel learning-to-teach framework, called hierarchical multiagent teaching (HMAT), that improves scalability to complex environments by using the deep representation for student policies and by advising with more expressive extended action sequences over multiple levels of temporal abstraction. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that HMAT improves team-wide learning progress in large, complex domains where previous approaches fail. HMAT also learns teaching policies that can effectively transfer knowledge to different teammates with knowledge of different tasks, even when the teammates have heterogeneous action spaces.