ConceptExplainer: Understanding the Mental Model of Deep Learning Algorithms via Interactive Concept-based Explanations

Traditional deep learning interpretability methods which are suitable for non-expert users cannot explain network behaviors at the global level and are inflexible at providing fine-grained explanations. As a solution, concept-based explanations are gaining attention due to their human intuitiveness and their flexibility to describe both global and local model behaviors. Concepts are groups of similarly meaningful pixels that express a notion, embedded within the network's latent space and have primarily been hand-generated, but have recently been discovered by automated approaches. Unfortunately, the magnitude and diversity of discovered concepts makes it difficult for non-experts to navigate and make sense of the concept space, and lack of easy-to-use software also makes concept explanations inaccessible to many non-expert users. Visual analytics can serve a valuable role in bridging these gaps by enabling structured navigation and exploration of the concept space to provide concept-based insights of model behavior to users. To this end, we design, develop, and validate ConceptExplainer, a visual analytics system that enables non-expert users to interactively probe and explore the concept space to explain model behavior at the instance/class/global level. The system was developed via iterative prototyping to address a number of design challenges that non-experts face in interpreting the behavior of deep learning models. Via a rigorous user study, we validate how ConceptExplainer supports these challenges. Likewise, we conduct a series of usage scenarios to demonstrate how the system supports the interactive analysis of model behavior across a variety of tasks and explanation granularities, such as identifying concepts that are important to classification, identifying bias in training data, and understanding how concepts can be shared across diverse and seemingly dissimilar classes.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

People's Perceptions Toward Bias and Related Concepts in Large Language Models: A Systematic Review

Large language models (LLMs) have brought breakthroughs in tasks including translation, summarization, information retrieval, and language generation, gaining growing interest in the CHI community. Meanwhile, the literature shows researchers' controversial perceptions about the efficacy, ethics, and intellectual abilities of LLMs. However, we do not know how lay people perceive LLMs that are pervasive in everyday tools, specifically regarding their experience with LLMs around bias, stereotypes, social norms, or safety. In this study, we conducted a systematic review to understand what empirical insights papers have gathered about people's perceptions toward LLMs. From a total of 231 retrieved papers, we full-text reviewed 15 papers that recruited human evaluators to assess their experiences with LLMs. We report different biases and related concepts investigated by these studies, four broader LLM application areas, the evaluators' perceptions toward LLMs' performances including advantages, biases, and conflicting perceptions, factors influencing these perceptions, and concerns about LLM applications

DPVis: Visual Analytics with Hidden Markov Models for Disease Progression Pathways

Clinical researchers use disease progression models to understand patient status and characterize progression patterns from longitudinal health records. One approach for disease progression modeling is to describe patient status using a small number of states that represent distinctive distributions over a set of observed measures. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) and its variants are a class of models that both discover these states and make inferences of health states for patients. Despite the advantages of using the algorithms for discovering interesting patterns, it still remains challenging for medical experts to interpret model outputs, understand complex modeling parameters, and clinically make sense of the patterns. To tackle these problems, we conducted a design study with clinical scientists, statisticians, and visualization experts, with the goal to investigate disease progression pathways of chronic diseases, namely type 1 diabetes (T1D), Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). As a result, we introduce DPVis which seamlessly integrates model parameters and outcomes of HMMs into interpretable and interactive visualizations. In this study, we demonstrate that DPVis is successful in evaluating disease progression models, visually summarizing disease states, interactively exploring disease progression patterns, and building, analyzing, and comparing clinically relevant patient subgroups.Comment: to appear at IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphic

PromptAid: Prompt Exploration, Perturbation, Testing and Iteration using Visual Analytics for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread popularity due to their ability to perform ad-hoc Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks with a simple natural language prompt. Part of the appeal for LLMs is their approachability to the general public, including individuals with no prior technical experience in NLP techniques. However, natural language prompts can vary significantly in terms of their linguistic structure, context, and other semantics. Modifying one or more of these aspects can result in significant differences in task performance. Non-expert users may find it challenging to identify the changes needed to improve a prompt, especially when they lack domain-specific knowledge and lack appropriate feedback. To address this challenge, we present PromptAid, a visual analytics system designed to interactively create, refine, and test prompts through exploration, perturbation, testing, and iteration. PromptAid uses multiple, coordinated visualizations which allow users to improve prompts by using the three strategies: keyword perturbations, paraphrasing perturbations, and obtaining the best set of in-context few-shot examples. PromptAid was designed through an iterative prototyping process involving NLP experts and was evaluated through quantitative and qualitative assessments for LLMs. Our findings indicate that PromptAid helps users to iterate over prompt template alterations with less cognitive overhead, generate diverse prompts with help of recommendations, and analyze the performance of the generated prompts while surpassing existing state-of-the-art prompting interfaces in performance

Spherical similarity explorer for comparative case analysis

Comparative Case Analysis (CCA) is an important tool for criminal investigation and crime theory extraction. It analyzes the commonalities and differences between a collection of crime reports in order to understand crime patterns and identify abnormal cases. A big challenge of CCA is the data processing and exploration. Traditional manual approach can no longer cope with the increasing volume and complexity of the data. In this paper we introduce a novel visual analytics system, Spherical Similarity Explorer (SSE) that automates the data processing process and provides interactive visualizations to support the data exploration. We illustrate the use of the system with uses cases that involve real world application data and evaluate the system with criminal intelligence analysts