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Francesca Toni

27 accepted papers

2026

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Assumption-Based Argumentation

AAAI 2026technical

Assumption‐Based Argumentation (ABA) is a powerful structured argumentation formalism, but exact computation of extensions under stable semantics is intractable for large frameworks. We present the first Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach to approximate credulous acceptance in ABA. To leverage GNN

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Synthesising Counterfactual Explanations via Label-Conditional Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders

ICLR 2026poster

Counterfactual explanations (CEs) provide recourse recommendations for individuals affected by algorithmic decisions. A key challenge is generating CEs that are robust against various perturbation types (e.g. input and model perturbations) while simultaneously satisfying other desirable properties.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Argumentative Large Language Models for Explainable and Contestable Claim Verification

AAAI 2025technical

The profusion of knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to apply this knowledge zero-shot in a range of settings makes them promising candidates for use in decision-making. However, they are currently limited by their inability to provide outputs which can be faithfully…

2025

Can Large Language Models perform Relation-based Argument Mining?

COLING 2025main

Relation-based Argument Mining (RbAM) is the process of automatically determining agreement (support) and disagreement (attack) relations amongst textual arguments (in the binary prediction setting), or neither relation (in the ternary prediction setting). As the number of platforms supporting onlin…

2025

Counterfactual Explanations Under Model Multiplicity and Their Use in Computational Argumentation

IJCAI 2025

Counterfactual explanations (CXs) are widely recognised as an essential technique for providing recourse recommendations for AI models. However, it is not obvious how to determine CXs in model multiplicity scenarios, where equally performing but different models can be obtained for the same task. In

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Evaluating Uncertainty Quantification Methods in Argumentative Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Research in uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important towards guaranteeing the reliability of this groundbreaking technology. We explore the integration of LLM UQ methods in argumentative LLMs (ArgLLMs), an explainable LLM framework for decision-makin

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Identifying Query-Relevant Neurons in Large Language Models for Long-Form Texts

AAAI 2025technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess vast amounts of knowledge within their parameters, prompting research into methods for locating and editing this knowledge. Previous work has largely focused on locating entity-related (often single-token) facts in smaller models. However, several key questions r…

2025

On Independence and SCC-Recursiveness in Assumption-Based Argumentation

IJCAI 2025

We introduce a notion of conditional independence in (flat) assumption-based argumentation (ABA), where independence between (sets of) assumptions amounts to the presence of information about one set of assumptions not impacting the acceptability of another. We study general properties, computationa

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ProtoArgNet: Interpretable Image Classification with Super-Prototypes and Argumentation

AAAI 2025technical

We propose ProtoArgNet, a novel interpretable deep neural architecture for image classification in the spirit of prototypical-part-learning as found, e.g., in ProtoPNet. While earlier approaches associate every class with multiple prototypical-parts, ProtoArgNet uses super-prototypes that combine pr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Representation Consistency for Accurate and Coherent LLM Answer Aggregation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Test-time scaling improves large language models' (LLMs) performance by allocating more compute budget during inference. To achieve this, existing methods often require intricate modifications to prompting and sampling strategies. In this work, we introduce representation consistency (RC), a test-ti…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Explaining Arguments’ Strength: Unveiling the Role of Attacks and Supports

IJCAI 2024poster

Quantitatively explaining the strength of arguments under gradual semantics has recently received increasing attention. Specifically, several works in the literature provide quantitative explanations by computing the attribution scores of arguments. These works disregard the importance of attacks an…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Grounded Object-Centric Learning

ICLR 2024poster

The extraction of object-centric representations for downstream tasks is an emerging area of research. Learning grounded representations of objects that are guaranteed to be stable and invariant promises robust performance across different tasks and environments. Slot Attention (SA) learns object-ce…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Identifiable Object-Centric Representation Learning via Probabilistic Slot Attention

NeurIPS 2024poster

Learning modular object-centric representations is said to be crucial for systematic generalization. Existing methods show promising object-binding capabilities empirically, but theoretical identifiability guarantees remain relatively underdeveloped. Understanding when object-centric representations…

2024

Instantiations and Computational Aspects of Non-Flat Assumption-based Argumentation

IJCAI 2024poster

Most existing computational tools for assumption-based argumentation (ABA) focus on so-called flat frameworks, disregarding the more general case. In this paper, we study an instantiation-based approach for reasoning in possibly non-flat ABA. We make use of a semantics-preserving translation between…

2024

Non-flat ABA Is an Instance of Bipolar Argumentation

AAAI 2024technical

Assumption-based Argumentation (ABA) is a well-known structured argumentation formalism, whereby arguments and attacks between them are drawn from rules, defeasible assumptions and their contraries. A common restriction imposed on ABA frameworks (ABAFs) is that they are flat, i.e. each of the defea…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Robust Counterfactual Explanations in Machine Learning: A Survey

IJCAI 2024poster

Counterfactual explanations (CEs) are advocated as being ideally suited to providing algorithmic recourse for subjects affected by the predictions of machine learning models. While CEs can be beneficial to affected individuals, recent work has exposed severe issues related to the robustness of state…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2024

Targeted Activation Penalties Help CNNs Ignore Spurious Signals

AAAI 2024technical

Neural networks (NNs) can learn to rely on spurious signals in the training data, leading to poor generalisation. Recent methods tackle this problem by training NNs with additional ground-truth annotations of such signals. These methods may, however, let spurious signals re-emerge in deep convolutio…

2024

Towards a Framework for Evaluating Explanations in Automated Fact Verification

COLING 2024main

As deep neural models in NLP become more complex, and as a consequence opaque, the necessity to interpret them becomes greater. A burgeoning interest has emerged in rationalizing explanations to provide short and coherent justifications for predictions. In this position paper, we advocate for a form…

2023

Explaining Random Forests Using Bipolar Argumentation and Markov Networks

AAAI 2023technical

Random forests are decision tree ensembles that can be used to solve a variety of machine learning problems. However, as the number of trees and their individual size can be large, their decision making process is often incomprehensible. We show that their decision process can be naturally represen…

2023

Formalising the Robustness of Counterfactual Explanations for Neural Networks

AAAI 2023technical

The use of counterfactual explanations (CFXs) is an increasingly popular explanation strategy for machine learning models. However, recent studies have shown that these explanations may not be robust to changes in the underlying model (e.g., following retraining), which raises questions about their…

2023

Honesty Is the Best Policy: Defining and Mitigating AI Deception

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Deceptive agents are a challenge for the safety, trustworthiness, and cooperation of AI systems. We focus on the problem that agents might deceive in order to achieve their goals (for instance, in our experiments with language models, the goal of being evaluated as truthful). There are a number of e…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2022

Logically Consistent Adversarial Attacks for Soft Theorem Provers

IJCAI 2022poster

Recent efforts within the AI community have yielded impressive results towards “soft theorem proving” over natural language sentences using language models. We propose a novel, generative adversarial framework for probing and improving these models’ reasoning capabilities. Adversarial attacks in thi…

2020

Relation-Based Counterfactual Explanations for Bayesian Network Classifiers

IJCAI 2020poster

We propose a general method for generating counterfactual explanations (CFXs) for a range of Bayesian Network Classifiers (BCs), e.g. single- or multi-label, binary or multidimensional. We focus on explanations built from relations of (critical and potential) influence between variables, indicating…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar