Reproducibility as a Mechanism for Teaching Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we explain the setup for a technical, graduate-level course on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence (FACT-AI) at the University of Amsterdam, which teaches FACT-AI concepts through the lens of reproducibility. The focal point of the course is a group project based on reproducing existing FACT-AI algorithms from top AI conferences and writing a corresponding report. In the first iteration of the course, we created an open source repository with the code implementations from the group projects. In the second iteration, we encouraged students to submit their group projects to the Machine Learning Reproducibility Challenge, resulting in 9 reports from our course being accepted for publication in the ReScience journal. We reflect on our experience teaching the course over two years, where one year coincided with a global pandemic, and propose guidelines for teaching FACT-AI through reproducibility in graduate-level AI study programs. We hope this can be a useful resource for instructors who want to set up similar courses in the future

CF-GNNExplainer: Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

Given the increasing promise of graph neural networks (GNNs) in real-world applications, several methods have been developed for explaining their predictions. Existing methods for interpreting predictions from GNNs have primarily focused on generating subgraphs that are especially relevant for a particular prediction. However, such methods are not counterfactual (CF) in nature: given a prediction, we want to understand how the prediction can be changed in order to achieve an alternative outcome. In this work, we propose a method for generating CF explanations for GNNs: the minimal perturbation to the input (graph) data such that the prediction changes. Using only edge deletions, we find that our method, CF-GNNExplainer, can generate CF explanations for the majority of instances across three widely used datasets for GNN explanations, while removing less than 3 edges on average, with at least 94\% accuracy. This indicates that CF-GNNExplainer primarily removes edges that are crucial for the original predictions, resulting in minimal CF explanations.Comment: Accepted to AISTATS 202

A Multistakeholder Approach Towards Evaluating AI Transparency Mechanisms

Given that there are a variety of stakeholders involved in, and affected by, decisions from machine learning (ML) models, it is important to consider that different stakeholders have different transparency needs. Previous work found that the majority of deployed transparency mechanisms primarily serve technical stakeholders. In our work, we want to investigate how well transparency mechanisms might work in practice for a more diverse set of stakeholders by conducting a large-scale, mixed-methods user study across a range of organizations, within a particular industry such as health care, criminal justice, or content moderation. In this paper, we outline the setup for our study.Comment: Accepted to CHI 2021 Workshop on Operationalizing Human-Centered Perspectives in Explainable A