Zahra Sadeghi

Zahra Sadeghi, Roohallah Alizadehsani, Mehmet Akif Cifci et al.

XAI refers to the techniques and methods for building AI applications which assist end users to interpret output and predictions of AI models. Black box AI applications in high-stakes decision-making situations, such as medical domain have increased the demand for transparency and explainability since wrong predictions may have severe consequences. Model explainability and interpretability are vital successful deployment of AI models in healthcare practices. AI applications' underlying reasoning needs to be transparent to clinicians in order to gain their trust. This paper presents a systematic review of XAI aspects and challenges in the healthcare domain. The primary goals of this study are to review various XAI methods, their challenges, and related machine learning models in healthcare. The methods are discussed under six categories: Features-oriented methods, global methods, concept models, surrogate models, local pixel-based methods, and human-centric methods. Most importantly, the paper explores XAI role in healthcare problems to clarify its necessity in safety-critical applications. The paper intends to establish a comprehensive understanding of XAI-related applications in the healthcare field by reviewing the related experimental results. To facilitate future research for filling research gaps, the importance of XAI models from different viewpoints and their limitations are investigated.

Noah Barrett, Zahra Sadeghi, Stan Matwin

Self-supervised Learning (SSL) is a machine learning algorithm for pretraining Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) without requiring manually labeled data. The central idea of this learning technique is based on an auxiliary stage aka pretext task in which labeled data are created automatically through data augmentation and exploited for pretraining the DNN. However, the effect of each pretext task is not well studied or compared in the literature. In this paper, we study the contribution of augmentation operators on the performance of self supervised learning algorithms in a constrained settings. We propose an evolutionary search method for optimization of data augmentation pipeline in pretext tasks and measure the impact of augmentation operators in several SOTA SSL algorithms. By encoding different combination of augmentation operators in chromosomes we seek the optimal augmentation policies through an evolutionary optimization mechanism. We further introduce methods for analyzing and explaining the performance of optimized SSL algorithms. Our results indicate that our proposed method can find solutions that outperform the accuracy of classification of SSL algorithms which confirms the influence of augmentation policy choice on the overall performance of SSL algorithms. We also compare optimal SSL solutions found by our evolutionary search mechanism and show the effect of batch size in the pretext task on two visual datasets.

Will Taylor-Melanson, Zahra Sadeghi, Stan Matwin

In this paper, we propose leveraging causal generative learning as an interpretable tool for explaining image classifiers. Specifically, we present a generative counterfactual inference approach to study the influence of visual features (i.e., pixels) as well as causal factors through generative learning. To this end, we first uncover the most influential pixels on a classifier's decision by varying the value of a causal attribute via counterfactual inference and computing both Shapely and contrastive explanations for counterfactual images with these different attribute values. We then establish a Monte-Carlo mechanism using the generator of a causal generative model in order to adapt Shapley explainers to produce feature importances for the human-interpretable attributes of a causal dataset in the case where a classifier has been trained exclusively on the images of the dataset. Finally, we present optimization methods for creating counterfactual explanations of classifiers by means of counterfactual inference, proposing straightforward approaches for both differentiable and arbitrary classifiers. We exploit the Morpho-MNIST causal dataset as a case study for exploring our proposed methods for generating counterfacutl explantions. We employ visual explanation methods from OmnixAI open source toolkit to compare them with our proposed methods. By employing quantitative metrics to measure the interpretability of counterfactual explanations, we find that our proposed methods of counterfactual explanation offer more interpretable explanations compared to those generated from OmnixAI. This finding suggests that our methods are well-suited for generating highly interpretable counterfactual explanations on causal datasets.

Ruixin Song, Md Mahbub Alam, Zahra Sadeghi et al.

Trajectory similarity is a fundamental task in analyzing mobility patterns, essential for applications such as route pattern extraction, mobility prediction, and anomaly detection. Traditional distance-based measures for computing similarity incur high computational cost, driving the adoption of lightweight learning-based approaches. Supervised methods rely on extensive labels derived from traditional distance measures and often reproduce these metrics, which limits generalization. While self-supervised learning addresses this issue through contrastive learning, it lacks a unified framework, making it difficult to compare deep learning (DL) models for consistent trajectory representation. Accordingly, this paper presents MoCo-AIS, a unified framework for learning vessel trajectory embeddings based on the Momentum Contrast (MoCo) paradigm, which formulates similarity learning through positive and negative trajectory pairs. Within this framework, we evaluate a diverse set of leading DL models on large-scale, real-world vessel-tracking AIS datasets that capture diverse navigation behaviors and operating conditions. Results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves similarity learning over existing baselines, while providing a benchmarking platform for evaluating trajectory representation models.

Zahra Sadeghi, Stan Matwin

Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) aims to detect influential input factors that lead a model to arrive at a certain decision and is a significant approach for mitigating the computational burden of processing high dimensional data. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and a comparison on global sensitivity analysis methods. Additionally, we propose a methodology for evaluating the efficacy of these methods by conducting a case study on MNIST digit dataset. Our study goes through the underlying mechanism of widely used GSA methods and highlights their efficacy through a comprehensive methodology.

Zahra Sadeghi

How do humans distinguish between general categories of objects? In a number of semantic category deficits, patients are good at making broad categorization but are unable to remember fine and specific details. It has been well accepted that general information about concepts is more robust to damages related to semantic memory. Results from patients with semantic memory disorders demonstrate the loss of ability in subcategory recognition. In this paper, we review the behavioral evidence for category specific disorder and show that general categories of animal and plant are visually distinguishable without processing textural information. To this aim, we utilize shape descriptors with an additional phase of feature learning. The results are evaluated with both supervised and unsupervised learning mechanisms and confirm that the proposed method can effectively discriminates between animal and plant object categories in visual domain.