It is not "accuracy vs. explainability" – we need both for trustworthy AI systems
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We are witnessing the emergence of an AI economy and society where AI technologies are increasingly impacting health care, business, transportation and many aspects of everyday life. Many successes have been reported where AI systems even surpassed the accuracy of human experts. However, AI systems may produce errors, can exhibit bias, may be sensitive to noise in the data, and often lack technical and judicial transparency resulting in reduction in trust and challenges in their adoption. These recent shortcomings and concerns have been documented in scientific but also in general press such as accidents with self driving cars, biases in healthcare, hiring and face recognition systems for people of color, seemingly correct medical decisions later found to be made due to wrong reasons etc. This resulted in emergence of many government and regulatory initiatives requiring trustworthy and ethical AI to provide accuracy and robustness, some form of explainability, human control and oversight, elimination of bias, judicial transparency and safety. The challenges in delivery of trustworthy AI systems motivated intense research on explainable AI systems (XAI). Aim of XAI is to provide human understandable information of how AI systems make their decisions. In this paper we first briefly summarize current XAI work and then challenge the recent arguments of accuracy vs. explainability for being mutually exclusive and being focused only on deep learning. We then present our recommendations for the use of XAI in full lifecycle of high stakes trustworthy AI systems delivery, e.g. development, validation and certification, and trustworthy production and maintenance.
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