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Joao Marques-Silva

18 accepted papers

2025

Most General Explanations of Tree Ensembles

IJCAI 2025

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is critical for attaining trust in the operation of AI systems. A key question of an AI system is ``why was this decision made this way''. Formal approaches to XAI use a formal model of the AI system to identify abductive explanations. While abductive explan

2023

Eliminating the Impossible, Whatever Remains Must Be True: On Extracting and Applying Background Knowledge in the Context of Formal Explanations

AAAI 2023technical

The rise of AI methods to make predictions and decisions has led to a pressing need for more explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods. One common approach for XAI is to produce a post-hoc explanation, explaining why a black box ML model made a certain prediction. Formal approaches to post-h…

2023

On Tackling Explanation Redundancy in Decision Trees (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2023poster

Claims about the interpretability of decision trees can be traced back to the origins of machine learning (ML). Indeed, given some input consistent with a decision tree's path, the explanation for the resulting prediction consists of the features in that path. Moreover, a growing number of works…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Solving Explainability Queries with Quantification: The Case of Feature Relevancy

AAAI 2023technical

Trustable explanations of machine learning (ML) models are vital in high-risk uses of artificial intelligence (AI). Apart from the computation of trustable explanations, a number of explainability queries have been identified and studied in recent work. Some of these queries involve solving quantifi…

2022

Constraint-Driven Explanations for Black-Box ML Models

AAAI 2022technical

The need to understand the inner workings of opaque Machine Learning models has prompted researchers to devise various types of post-hoc explanations. A large class of such explainers proceed in two phases: first perturb an input instance whose explanation is sought, and then generate an interpretab…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2022

Tractable Explanations for d-DNNF Classifiers

AAAI 2022technical

Compilation into propositional languages finds a growing number of practical uses, including in constraint programming, diagnosis and machine learning (ML), among others. One concrete example is the use of propositional languages as classifiers, and one natural question is how to explain the predict…

2022

Using MaxSAT for Efficient Explanations of Tree Ensembles

AAAI 2022technical

Tree ensembles (TEs) denote a prevalent machine learning model that do not offer guarantees of interpretability, that represent a challenge from the perspective of explainable artificial intelligence. Besides model agnostic approaches, recent work proposed to explain TEs with formally-defined explan…

2021

A Scalable Two Stage Approach to Computing Optimal Decision Sets

AAAI 2021technical

Machine learning (ML) is ubiquitous in modern life. Since it is being deployed in technologies that affect our privacy and safety, it is often crucial to understand the reasoning behind its decisions, warranting the need for explainable AI. Rule-based models, such as decision trees, decision lists,…

2021

Explanations for Monotonic Classifiers.

ICML 2021spotlight

In many classification tasks there is a requirement of monotonicity. Concretely, if all else remains constant, increasing (resp. decreasing) the value of one or more features must not decrease (resp. increase) the value of the prediction. Despite comprehensive efforts on learning monotonic classifie…

Cited by 73SourcePDFScholar
2021

Reasoning-Based Learning of Interpretable ML Models

IJCAI 2021poster

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely used in decision making procedures in myriads of real-world applications across important practical areas such as finance, healthcare, education, and safety critical systems. Due to its ubiquitous use in safety and privacy critical domains, it is often vital to…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2020

Explaining Naive Bayes and Other Linear Classifiers with Polynomial Time and Delay

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Recent work proposed the computation of so-called PI-explanations of Naive Bayes Classifiers (NBCs). PI-explanations are subset-minimal sets of feature-value pairs that are sufficient for the prediction, and have been computed with state-of-the-art exact algorithms that are worst-case exponential in…

2019

On Relating Explanations and Adversarial Examples

NeurIPS 2019poster

The importance of explanations (XP's) of machine learning (ML) model predictions and of adversarial examples (AE's) cannot be overstated, with both arguably being essential for the practical success of ML in different settings. There has been recent work on understanding and assessing the relationsh…