Publisher: Dagstuhl Reports, Link >

Abstract

The presentation turns around the subject of explainable AI. More specifically, we deal with attribution numerical scores that are assigned to features values of an entity under classification, to identify and rank their importance for the obtained classification label. We concentrate on the popular SHAP score [2] that can be applied with black-box and open models. We show that, in contrast to its general #P-hardness, it can be computed in polynomial time for classifiers that are based on decomposable and deterministic Boolean decision circuits. This class of classifiers includes decision trees and ordered binary decision diagrams. This result was established in [1]. The presentation illustrates how the proof heavily relies on the connection to SAT-related computational problems.


Self-regulation is a key skill for academic success, and to measure self-regulation strategies is especially important in the context of engineering education. However, measuring self-regulation strategies in engineering students has been a challenge due to the lack of validated instruments in Spanish. The objective of this study is developing an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify the factors of the instrument the Self-Regulation Strategy Inventory - Self Report (SRSI-SR) to measure self-regulation strategies in engineering students. The design was instrumental, with the participation of 140 Chilean engineering students. The results show adequate validity and reliability indices, being made up of 16 items represented in 4 factors: 1) Organization of the environment, 2) Organization of the task, 3) Information search and 4) Inadequate regulation habits. We suggest that our adaptation of the SRSI-SR instrument to Spanish can be useful to measure self-regulation strategies in engineering students.

The areas of safety and robustness are key areas where communities from verification, neuro-symbolic AI, and machine learning come together. Safety and robustness are often formalized in terms of point-wise metrics: given an input point, we identify a circle or a region where certain properties hold in terms of the consistency of prediction. However, the broader goal of neuro-symbolic AI applied to machine learning correctness would ideally integrate safety and robustness conditions with explanations. Nonetheless, there is no paper that discusses these properties in a unified manner. What we consider in this paper is a new simple framework for formalizing a variety of such properties. We are able to characterize the robustness condition, safety conditions, hyper-safety conditions, counterfactual explanations, and fairness, among others. We can express these properties using simple notation for an abstract model based on a binary classifier. We hope these definitions would lead to neuro-symbolic frameworks that contribute to all of these areas jointly.

The formal XAI community has studied a plethora of interpretability queries aiming to understand the classifcations made by decision trees. However, a more uniform understanding of what questions we can hope to answer about these models, traditionally deemed to be easily interpretable, has remained elusive. In an initial attempt to understand uniform languages for interpretability, Arenas et al. (2021) proposed FOIL, a logic for explaining black-box ML models, and showed that it can express a variety of interpretability queries. However, we show that FOIL is limited in two important senses: (i) it is not expressive enough to capture some crucial queries, and (ii) its model-agnostic nature results in a high computational complexity for decision trees. In this paper, we carefully craft two fragments of frst-order logic that allow for effciently interpreting decision trees: Q-DT-FOIL and its optimization variant OPT-DT-FOIL. We show that our proposed logics can express not only a variety of interpretability queries considered by previous literature but also elegantly allows users to specify different objectives the sought explanations should optimize for. Using fnite model-theoretic techniques, we show that the different ingredients of Q-DT-FOIL are necessary for its expressiveness, and yet that queries in QDT-FOIL can be evaluated with a polynomial number of queries to a SAT solver, as well as their optimization versions in OPT-DT-FOIL. Besides our theoretical results, we provide a SAT-based implementation of the evaluation for OPT-DTFOIL that is performant on industry-size decision trees.

Publisher: arXiv, Link>

ABSTRACT

We describe how answer-set programs can be used to declaratively specify counterfactual interventions on entities under classification, and reason about them. In particular, they can be used to define and compute responsibility scores as attribution-based explanations for outcomes from classification models. The approach allows for the inclusion of domain knowledge and supports query answering. A detailed example with a naive-Bayes classifier is presented.


Publisher: Journal of Machine Learning Research, Link>

ABSTRACT

Alternatives to recurrent neural networks, in particular, architectures based on self-attention, are gaining momentum for processing input sequences. In spite of their relevance, the computational properties of such networks have not yet been fully explored. We study the computational power of the Transformer, one of the most paradigmatic architectures exemplifying self-attention. We show that the Transformer with hard-attention is Turing complete exclusively based on their capacity to compute and access internal dense representations of the data. Our study also reveals some minimal sets of elements needed to obtain this completeness result.


[:en]Publisher: ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL), Link>

ABSTRACT

We study the complexity of various fundamental counting problems that arise in the context of incomplete databases, i.e., relational databases that can contain unknown values in the form of labeled nulls. Specifically, we assume that the domains of these unknown values are finite and, for a Boolean query q, we consider the following two problems: Given as input an incomplete database D, (a) return the number of completions of D that satisfy q; or (b) return the number of valuations of the nulls of D yielding a completion that satisfies q. We obtain dichotomies between #P-hardness and polynomial-time computability for these problems when q is a self-join–free conjunctive query and study the impact on the complexity of the following two restrictions: (1) every null occurs at most once in D (what is called Codd tables); and (2) the domain of each null is the same. Roughly speaking, we show that counting completions is much harder than counting valuations: For instance, while the latter is always in #P, we prove that the former is not in #P under some widely believed theoretical complexity assumption. Moreover, we find that both (1) and (2) can reduce the complexity of our problems. We also study the approximability of these problems and show that, while counting valuations always has a fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS), in most cases counting completions does not. Finally, we consider more expressive query languages and situate our problems with respect to known complexity classes.

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A key question in the analysis of discrete models for material defects, such as vortices in spin systems and superconductors or isolated dislocations in metals, is whether information on boundary energy for a domain can be sufficient for controlling the number of defects in the interior. We present a general combinatorial dipole-removal argument for a large class of discrete models including XY systems and screw dislocation models, allowing to prove sharp conditions under which controlled flux and boundary energy guarantee that minimizers with zero or one charges in the interior exist. The argument uses the max-flow min-cut theorem in combination with an ad-hoc duality for planar graphs, and is robust with respect to changes of the function defining the interaction energies.

Publisher: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, Link>

ABSTRACT

We propose answer-set programs that specify and compute counterfactual interventions on entities that are input on a classification model. In relation to the outcome of the model, the resulting counterfactual entities serve as a basis for the definition and computation of causality-based explanation scores for the feature values in the entity under classification, namely responsibility scores. The approach and the programs can be applied with black-box models, and also with models that can be specified as logic programs, such as rule-based classifiers. The main focus of this study is on the specification and computation of best counterfactual entities, that is, those that lead to maximum responsibility scores. From them one can read off the explanations as maximum responsibility feature values in the original entity. We also extend the programs to bring into the picture semantic or domain knowledge. We show how the approach could be extended by means of probabilistic methods, and how the underlying probability distributions could be modified through the use of constraints. Several examples of programs written in the syntax of the DLV ASP-solver, and run with it, are shown.


Using tools from computable analysis, we develop a notion of effectiveness for general dynamical systems as those group actions on arbitrary spaces that contain a computable representative in their topological conjugacy class. Most natural systems one can think of are effective in this sense, including some group rotations, affine actions on the torus and finitely presented algebraic actions. We show that for finitely generated and recursively presented groups, every effective dynamical system is the topological factor of a computable action on an effectively closed subset of the Cantor space. We then apply this result to extend the simulation results available in the literature beyond zero-dimensional spaces. In particular, we show that for a large class of groups, many of these natural actions are topological factors of subshifts of finite type.

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