Reframing Explanation as an Interactive Medium: The EQUAS (Explainable QUestion Answering System) Project

This letter provides a retrospective analysis of our team’s research performed under the DARPA Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) project. We began by exploring salience maps, English sentences, and lists of feature names for explaining the behavior of deep-learning-based discriminative systems, especially visual question answering systems. We demonstrated limited positive effects from statically presenting explanations along with system answers – for example when teaching people to identify bird species. Many XAI performers were getting better results when users interacted with explanations. This motivated us to evolve the notion of explanation as an interactive medium – usually, between humans and AI systems but sometimes within the software system. We realized that interacting via explanations could enable people to task and adapt ML agents. We added affordances for editing explanations and modified the ML system to act in accordance with the edits to produce an interpretable interface to the agent. Through this interface, editing an explanation can adapt a system’s performance to new, modified purposes. This deep tasking, wherein the agent knows its objective and the explanation for that objective will be critical to enable higher levels of autonomy.