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Andrea Passerini

22 accepted papers

2026

Benchmarking XAI Explanations with Human-Aligned Evaluations

AAAI 2026technical

We introduce PASTA (Perceptual Assessment System for explanaTion of Artificial Intelligence), a novel human-centric framework for evaluating eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques in computer vision. Our first contribution is the creation of the PASTA-dataset, the first large-scale benchmark that spans a d

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

GNN Explanations that do not Explain and How to find Them

ICLR 2026poster

Explanations provided by Self-explainable Graph Neural Networks (SE-GNNs) are fundamental for understanding the model's inner workings and for identifying potential misuse of sensitive attributes. Although recent works have highlighted that these explanations can be suboptimal and potentially mislea…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Rethinking GNNs and Missing Features: Challenges, Evaluation and a Robust Solution

ICML 2026poster

Handling missing node features is a key challenge for deploying Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in real-world domains such as healthcare and sensor networks. Existing studies mostly address relatively benign scenarios, namely benchmark datasets with (a) high-dimensional but sparse node features and (b)…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Probabilistic Neuro-symbolic Layer for Algebraic Constraint Satisfaction

UAI 2025

In safety-critical applications, guaranteeing the satisfaction of constraints over continuous environments is crucial, e.g., an autonomous agent should never crash over obstacles or go off-road. Neural models struggle in the presence of these constraints, especially when they involve intricate algeb

2025

Beyond Topological Self-Explainable GNNs: A Formal Explainability Perspective

ICML 2025poster

Self-Explainable Graph Neural Networks (SE-GNNs) are popular explainable-by-design GNNs, but their explanations' properties and limitations are not well understood. Our first contribution fills this gap by formalizing the explanations extracted by some popular SE-GNNs, referred to as Minimal Explana…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Bridging Theory and Practice in Link Representation with Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used to compute representations of node pairs for downstream tasks such as link prediction. Yet, theoretical understanding of their expressive power has focused almost entirely on graph-level representations. In this work, we shift the focus to links and provi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Reconsidering Faithfulness in Regular, Self-Explainable and Domain Invariant GNNs

ICLR 2025poster

As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) become more pervasive, it becomes paramount to build reliable tools for explaining their predictions. A core desideratum is that explanations are *faithful*, i.e., that they portray an accurate picture of the GNN's reasoning process. However, a number of different fai…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Shortcuts and Identifiability in Concept-based Models from a Neuro-Symbolic Lens

NeurIPS 2025poster

Concept-based Models are neural networks that learn a concept extractor to map inputs to high-level concepts and an inference layer to translate these into predictions. Ensuring these modules produce interpretable concepts and behave reliably in out-of-distribution is crucial, yet the conditions for…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Simple Path Structural Encoding for Graph Transformers

ICML 2025poster

Graph transformers extend global self-attention to graph-structured data, achieving notable success in graph learning. Recently, random walk structural encoding (RWSE) has been found to further enhance their predictive power by encoding both structural and positional information into the edge repres…

2024

A Neuro-Symbolic Benchmark Suite for Concept Quality and Reasoning Shortcuts

NeurIPS 2024poster

The advent of powerful neural classifiers has increased interest in problems that require both learning and reasoning. These problems are critical for understanding important properties of models, such as trustworthiness, generalization, interpretability, and compliance to safety and structural cons…

Cited by 4SourcecodeScholar
2024

BEARS Make Neuro-Symbolic Models Aware of their Reasoning Shortcuts

UAI 2024poster

Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) predictors that conform to symbolic knowledge {–} encoding, e.g., safety constraints {–} can be affected by Reasoning Shortcuts (RSs): They learn concepts consistent with the symbolic knowledge by exploiting unintended semantics. RSs compromise reliability and generalization an…

2023

Concept-level Debugging of Part-Prototype Networks

ICLR 2023top-25%

Part-prototype Networks (ProtoPNets) are concept-based classifiers designed to achieve the same performance as black-box models without compromising transparency. ProtoPNets compute predictions based on similarity to class-specific part-prototypes learned to recognize parts of training examples, mak…

2023

Global Explainability of GNNs via Logic Combination of Learned Concepts

ICLR 2023poster

While instance-level explanation of GNN is a well-studied problem with plenty of approaches being developed, providing a global explanation for the behaviour of a GNN is much less explored, despite its potential in interpretability and debugging. Existing solutions either simply list local explanati…

2023

Neuro-Symbolic Continual Learning: Knowledge, Reasoning Shortcuts and Concept Rehearsal

ICML 2023poster

We introduce Neuro-Symbolic Continual Learning, where a model has to solve a sequence of neuro-symbolic tasks, that is, it has to map sub-symbolic inputs to high-level concepts and compute predictions by reasoning consistently with prior knowledge. Our key observation is that neuro-symbolic tasks, a…

2023

Not All Neuro-Symbolic Concepts Are Created Equal: Analysis and Mitigation of Reasoning Shortcuts

NeurIPS 2023poster

Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) predictive models hold the promise of improved compliance with given constraints, systematic generalization, and interpretability, as they allow to infer labels that are consistent with some prior knowledge by reasoning over high-level concepts extracted from sub-symbolic input…

2022

GlanceNets: Interpretable, Leak-proof Concept-based Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

There is growing interest in concept-based models (CBMs) that combine high-performance and interpretability by acquiring and reasoning with a vocabulary of high-level concepts. A key requirement is that the concepts be interpretable. Existing CBMs tackle this desideratum using a variety of heuristic…

Cited by 73SourcePDFScholar
2022

SMT-based weighted model integration with structure awareness

UAI 2022poster

Weighted Model Integration (WMI) is a popular formalism aimed at unifying approaches for probabilistic inference in hybrid domains, involving logical and algebraic constraints. Despite a considerable amount of recent work, allowing WMI algorithms to scale with the complexity of the hybrid problem is…

2021

Hybrid Probabilistic Inference with Logical and Algebraic Constraints: a Survey

IJCAI 2021poster

Real world decision making problems often involve both discrete and continuous variables and require a combination of probabilistic and deterministic knowledge. Stimulated by recent advances in automated reasoning technology, hybrid (discrete+continuous) probabilistic…

2021

Interactive Label Cleaning with Example-based Explanations

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

We tackle sequential learning under label noise in applications where a human supervisor can be queried to relabel suspicious examples. Existing approaches are flawed, in that they only relabel incoming examples that look "suspicious" to the model. As a consequence, those mislabeled examples that el…

2021

Learning Aggregation Functions

IJCAI 2021poster

Learning on sets is increasingly gaining attention in the machine learning community, due to its widespread applicability. Typically, representations over sets are computed by using fixed aggregation functions such as sum or maximum. However, recent results showed that universal function representat…

2020

Efficient Generation of Structured Objects with Constrained Adversarial Networks

NeurIPS 2020poster

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) struggle to generate structured objects like molecules and game maps. The issue is that structured objects must satisfy hard requirements (e.g., molecules must be chemically valid) that are difficult to acquire from examples alone. As a remedy, we propose Const…

2020

Learning in the Wild with Incremental Skeptical Gaussian Processes

IJCAI 2020poster

The ability to learn from human supervision is fundamental for personal assistants and other interactive applications of AI. Two central challenges for deploying interactive learners in the wild are the unreliable nature of the supervision and the varying complexity of the prediction task. We addres…