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Displaying confidence scores in human-AI interaction has been shown to help build trust between humans and AI systems. However, most existing research uses only the confidence score as a form of communication. As confidence scores are just another model output, users may want to understand why the algorithm is confident to determine whether to accept the confidence score. In this paper, we show that counterfactual explanations of confidence scores help study participants to better understand and better trust a machine learning model&#39;s prediction. We present two methods for understanding model confidence using counterfactual explanation: (1) based on counterfactual examples; and (2) based on visualisation of the counterfactual space. Both increase understanding and trust for study participants over a baseline of no explanation, but qualitative results show that they are used quite differently, leading to recommendations of when to use each one and directions of designing better explanations.

AAAI 2023

Explaining Model Confidence using Counterfactuals

hai: other foundations of humans & ai

hai: human-computer interaction

peai: interpretability and explainability

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Displaying confidence scores in human-AI interaction has been shown to help build trust between humans and AI systems. However, most existing research uses only the confidence score as a form of communication. As confidence scores are just another model output, users may want to understand why the algorithm is confident to determine whether to accept the confidence score. In this paper, we show that counterfactual explanations of confidence scores help study participants to better understand and better trust a machine learning model's prediction. We present two methods for understanding model confidence using counterfactual explanation: (1) based on counterfactual examples; and (2) based on visualisation of the counterfactual space. Both increase understanding and trust for study participants over a baseline of no explanation, but qualitative results show that they are used quite differently, leading to recommendations of when to use each one and directions of designing better explanations.

poster

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

Restart-based Branch-and-Bound Search (BBS) is a standard algorithm for solving Constraint Optimization Problems (COPs). In this paper, we propose an approach to find good partial assignments to jumpstart search at each restart for general COPs, which are identified by comparing different best solutions found in different restart runs. We consider information extracted from historical solutions to evaluate the quality of the partial assignments. Thus the good partial assignments are dynamically updated as the current best solution evolves.  Our approach makes restart-based BBS explore different promising sub-search-spaces to find high-quality solutions.  Experiments on the MiniZinc benchmark suite show how our approach brings significant improvements to a black-box COP solver equipped with the state of the art search techniques. Our method finds better solutions and proves optimality for more instances.

Finding Good Partial Assignments During Restart-based Branch and Bound Search

Learning multi-organ segmentation from multiple partially-annotated datasets attracts increasing attention. It can be a promising solution for the scarcity of large-scale, fully labeled 3D medical image segmentation datasets. However, existing algorithms of multi-organ segmentation on partially-labeled datasets neglect the semantic relations and anatomical priors between different categories of organs, which is crucial for partially-labeled multi-organ segmentation. In this paper, we tackle the limitations above by proposing the Cross-class Query Network (CCQ). CCQ consists of an image encoder module, a cross-class query learning module, and an attentive refinement segmentation. More specifically, the image encoder captures the long-range dependency of a single image via the transformer encoder. Cross-class query learning module first generates query vectors that represent semantic concepts of different categories and then utilizes these query vectors to find the class-relevant features of image representation for segmentation. The attentive refinement segmentation with an attentive skip connection incorporates the high-resolution image details and eliminates the class-irrelevant noise. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that CCQ outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the MOTS dataset, which consists of seven organ and tumor segmentation tasks. 

CCQ: Cross-class Query Network for Partially Labeled Organ Segmentation

In person re-identification (re-ID) task, it is still challenging to learn discriminative representation by deep learning, due to limited data. Generally speaking, the model will get better performance when increasing the amount of data. The addition of similar classes strengthens the ability of the classifier to identify similar identities, thereby improving the discrimination of representation. In this paper, we propose a Diverse and Compact Transformer (DC-Former) that can achieve a similar effect by splitting embedding space into multiple diverse and compact subspaces. Compact embedding subspace helps model learn more robust and discriminative embedding to identify similar classes. And the fusion of these diverse embeddings containing more fine-grained information can further improve the effect of re-ID. Specifically, multiple class tokens are used in vision transformer to represent multiple embedding spaces. Then, a self-diverse constraint (SDC) is applied to these spaces to push them away from each other, which makes each embedding space diverse and compact. Further, a dynamic weight controller (DWC) is further designed for balancing the relative importance among them during training. The experimental results of our method are promising, which surpass previous state-of-the-art methods on several commonly used person re-ID benchmarks.

DC-Former: Diverse and Compact Transformer for Person Re-Identification

Path attribution methods are a popular tool to interpret a visual model's prediction on an input. They integrate model gradients for the input features over a path defined between the input and a reference, thereby satisfying certain desirable theoretical properties. However, their reliability hinges on the choice of the reference. Moreover, they do not exhibit weak dependence on the input, which leads to counter-intuitive feature attribution mapping. We show that path-based attribution can account for the weak dependence property by choosing the reference from the local distribution of the input. We devise a method to identify the local input distribution and propose a technique to stochastically integrate the model gradients over the paths defined by the references sampled from that distribution. Our local path integration (LPI) method is found to consistently outperform existing path attribution techniques when evaluated on deep visual models. Contributing to the ongoing search of reliable evaluation metrics for the interpretation methods, we also introduce DiffID metric that uses the relative difference between insertion and deletion games to alleviate the distribution shift problem faced by existing metrics.

Local Path Integration for Attribution

Cross-domain recommendation has attracted increasing attention from industry and academia recently. However, most existing methods do not exploit the interest invariance between domains, which would yield sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain recommendation method: Self-supervised Interest Transfer Network (SITN), which can effectively transfer invariant knowledge between domains via prototypical contrastive learning. Specifically, we perform two levels of cross-domain contrastive learning: 1) instance-to-instance contrastive learning, 2) instance-to-cluster contrastive learning. Not only that, we also take into account users' multi-granularity and multi-view interests. With this paradigm, SITN can explicitly learn the invariant knowledge of interest clusters between domains and accurately capture users' intents and preferences. We conducted extensive experiments on a public dataset and a large-scale industrial dataset collected from one of the world's leading e-commerce corporations. The experimental results indicate that SITN achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art recommendation methods. Additionally, SITN has been deployed on a micro-video recommendation platform, and the online A/B testing results further demonstrate its practical value. Supplement is available at: https://github.com/fanqieCoffee/SITN-Supplement.

Self-supervised Interest Transfer Network via Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Retrosynthesis, which predicts the reactants of a given target molecule, is an essential task for drug discovery. 
In recent years, the machine learing based retrosynthesis methods have achieved promising results.
In this work, we introduce RetroKNN, a local reaction template retrieval method to further boost the performance of template-based systems with non-parametric retrieval. We first build an atom-template store and a bond-template store that contains the local templates in the training data, then retrieve from these templates with a k-nearest-neighbor (KNN) search during inference. The retrieved templates are combined with neural network predictions as the final output.
Furthermore, we propose a lightweight adapter to adjust the weights when combing neural network and KNN predictions conditioned on the hidden representation and the retrieved templates.
We conduct comprehensive experiments on two widely used benchmarks, the USPTO-50K and USPTO-MIT.
Especially for the top-1 accuracy, we improved 7.1\% on the USPTO-50K dataset and 12.0\% on the USPTO-MIT dataset.
These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Retrosynthesis Prediction with Local Template Retrieval

Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd" to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,"  resulting in the project not being funded. Researchers introduce refunds for single project CC to incentivize agents to contribute, guaranteeing the project's funding. These funding guarantees are applicable only when agents have an unlimited budget. This paper focuses on a combinatorial setting, where multiple projects are available for CC and agents have a limited budget. We study specific conditions where funding can be guaranteed. Naturally, funding the optimal social welfare subset of projects is desirable when every available project cannot be funded due to budget restrictions. We prove the impossibility of achieving optimal welfare at equilibrium for any monotone refund scheme. Further, given the contributions of other agents, we prove that it is NP-Hard for an agent to determine its optimal strategy. That is, while profitable deviations may exist for agents instead of funding the optimal welfare subset, it is computationally hard for an agent to find its optimal deviation. Consequently, we study different heuristics agents can use to contribute to the projects in practice. We demonstrate the heuristics' performance as the average-case trade-off between the welfare obtained and an agent's utility through simulations.

Combinatorial Civic Crowdfunding with Budgeted Agents: Welfare Optimality at Equilibrium and Optimal Deviation

Regularized discrete optimal transport (OT) is a powerful tool to measure the distance between two discrete distributions that have been constructed from data samples on two different domains. While it has a wide range of applications in machine learning, in some cases the sampled data from only one of the domains will have class labels such as unsupervised domain adaptation. In this kind of problem setting, a group-sparse regularizer is frequently leveraged as a regularization term to handle class labels. In particular, it can preserve the label structure on the data samples by corresponding the data samples with the same class label to one group-sparse regularization term. As a result, we can measure the distance while utilizing label information by solving the regularized optimization problem with gradient-based algorithms. However, the gradient computation is expensive when the number of classes or data samples is large because the number of regularization terms and their respective sizes also turn out to be large. This paper proposes fast discrete OT with group-sparse regularizers. Our method is based on two ideas. The first is to safely skip the computations of the gradients that must be zero. The second is to efficiently extract the gradients that are expected to be nonzero. Our method is guaranteed to return the same value of the objective function as that of the original approach. Experiments demonstrate that our method is up to 8.6 times faster than the original method without degrading accuracy.

Fast Regularized Discrete Optimal Transport with Group-sparse Regularizers

Concept relatedness estimation (CRE) aims to determine whether two given concepts are related. Existing methods only consider the pairwise relationship between concepts, while overlooking the higher-order relationship that could be encoded in a concept-level graph structure. We discover that this underlying graph satisfies a set of intrinsic properties of CRE, including reflexivity, commutativity, and transitivity. In this paper, we formalize the CRE properties and introduce a graph structure named ConcreteGraph. To address the data scarcity issue in CRE, we introduce a novel data augmentation approach to sample new concept pairs from the graph. As it is intractable for data augmentation to fully capture the structural information of the ConcreteGraph due to a large amount of potential concept pairs, we further introduce a novel Graph Component Contrastive Learning framework to implicitly learn the complete structure of the ConcreteGraph. Empirical results on three datasets show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art model. Detailed ablation studies demonstrate that our proposed approach can effectively capture the high-order relationship among concepts.

Graph Component Contrastive Learning for Concept Relatedness Estimation

Due to the powerful capability to gather the information of neighborhood nodes, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has become a widely explored hotspot in recent years. As a well-established extension, Graph AutoEncoder (GAE) succeeds in mining underlying node representations via evaluating the quality of adjacency matrix reconstruction from learned features. However, limited works on GAE were devoted to leveraging both semantic and topological graphs, and they only indirectly extracted the relationships between graphs via weights shared by features. To better capture the connections between nodes from these two types of graphs, this paper proposes a graph neural network dubbed Dual Low-Rank Graph AutoEncoder (DLR-GAE), which takes both semantic and topological homophily into consideration. Differing from prior works that share common weights between GCNs, the presented DLR-GAE conducts sustained exploration of low-rank information between two distinct graphs, and reconstructs adjacency matrices from learned latent factors and embeddings. In order to obtain valid adjacency matrices that meet certain conditions, we design some surrogates and projections to restrict the learned factor matrix. We compare the proposed model with state-of-the-art methods on several datasets, which demonstrates the superior accuracy of DLR-GAE in semi-supervised classification.

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