K. C. Santosh

KC Santosh, Srikanth Baride, Rodrigue Rizk

As machine learning (ML) continues its rapid expansion, the environmental cost of model training and inference has become a critical societal concern. Existing benchmarks overwhelmingly focus on standard performance metrics such as accuracy, BLEU, or mAP, while largely ignoring energy consumption and carbon emissions. This single-objective evaluation paradigm is increasingly misaligned with the practical requirements of large-scale deployment, particularly in energy-constrained environments such as mobile devices, developing regions, and climate-aware enterprises. In this paper, we propose AI-CARE, an evaluation tool for reporting energy consumption, and carbon emissions of ML models. In addition, we introduce the carbon-performance tradeoff curve, an interpretable tool that visualizes the Pareto frontier between performance and carbon cost. We demonstrate, through theoretical analysis and empirical validation on representative ML workloads, that carbon-aware benchmarking changes the relative ranking of models and encourages architectures that are simultaneously accurate and environmentally responsible. Our proposal aims to shift the research community toward transparent, multi-objective evaluation and align ML progress with global sustainability goals. The tool and documentation are available at https://github.com/USD-AI-ResearchLab/ai-care.

Longwei Wang, Ifrat Ikhtear Uddin, KC Santosh

Medical image analysis faces two critical challenges: scarcity of labeled data and lack of model interpretability, both hindering clinical AI deployment. Few-shot learning (FSL) addresses data limitations but lacks transparency in predictions. Active learning (AL) methods optimize data acquisition but overlook interpretability of acquired samples. We propose a dual-framework solution: Expert-Guided Explainable Few-Shot Learning (EGxFSL) and Explainability-Guided AL (xGAL). EGxFSL integrates radiologist-defined regions-of-interest as spatial supervision via Grad-CAM-based Dice loss, jointly optimized with prototypical classification for interpretable few-shot learning. xGAL introduces iterative sample acquisition prioritizing both predictive uncertainty and attention misalignment, creating a closed-loop framework where explainability guides training and sample selection synergistically. On the BraTS (MRI), VinDr-CXR (chest X-ray), and SIIM-COVID-19 (chest X-ray) datasets, we achieve accuracies of 92\%, 76\%, and 62\%, respectively, consistently outperforming non-guided baselines across all datasets. Under severe data constraints, xGAL achieves 76\% accuracy with only 680 samples versus 57\% for random sampling. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate guided models focus on diagnostically relevant regions, with generalization validated on breast ultrasound confirming cross-modality applicability.

Longwei Wang, Mohammad Navid Nayyem, Abdullah Al Rakin et al.

The growing reliance on deep learning models in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and autonomous navigation underscores the need for defenses that are both robust to adversarial perturbations and transparent in their decision-making. In this paper, we identify a connection between interpretability and robustness that can be directly leveraged during training. Specifically, we observe that spurious, unstable, or semantically irrelevant features identified through Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) contribute disproportionately to adversarial vulnerability. Building on this insight, we introduce an attribution-guided refinement framework that transforms LIME from a passive diagnostic into an active training signal. Our method systematically suppresses spurious features using feature masking, sensitivity-aware regularization, and adversarial augmentation in a closed-loop refinement pipeline. This approach does not require additional datasets or model architectures and integrates seamlessly into standard adversarial training. Theoretically, we derive an attribution-aware lower bound on adversarial distortion that formalizes the link between explanation alignment and robustness. Empirical evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-10-C, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate substantial improvements in adversarial robustness and out-of-distribution generalization.

Casey Wall, Longwei Wang, Rodrigue Rizk et al.

Interpreting the decision-making process of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is critical for deploying models in high-stakes domains. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) is a widely used method for visual explanations, yet it typically focuses on the final convolutional layer or naïvely averages across layers, strategies that can obscure important semantic cues or amplify irrelevant noise. We propose Winsor-CAM, a novel, human-tunable extension of Grad-CAM that generates robust and coherent saliency maps by aggregating information across all convolutional layers. To mitigate the influence of noisy or extreme attribution values, Winsor-CAM applies Winsorization, a percentile-based outlier attenuation technique. A user-controllable threshold allows for semantic-level tuning, enabling flexible exploration of model behavior across representational hierarchies. Evaluations on standard architectures (ResNet50, DenseNet121, VGG16, InceptionV3) using the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset demonstrate that Winsor-CAM produces more interpretable heatmaps and achieves superior performance in localization metrics, including intersection-over-union and center-of-mass alignment, when compared to Grad-CAM and uniform layer-averaging baselines. Winsor-CAM advances the goal of trustworthy AI by offering interpretable, multi-layer insights with human-in-the-loop control.