Cited by 278Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Usability and User Interface DesignHuman-Automation Interaction and Safety

Towards Human-Centered Explainable AI: A Survey of User Studies for Model Explanations

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Rong, Yao, Leemann, Tobias, Nguyen, Thai-Trang, Fiedler, Lisa, Qian, Peizhu, Unhelkar, Vaibhav, Seidel, Tina, Kasneci, Gjergji +1 more·2024·IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Abstract

Explainable AI (XAI) is widely viewed as a sine qua non for ever-expanding AI research. A better understanding of the needs of XAI users, as well as human-centered evaluations of explainable models are both a necessity and a challenge. In this paper, we explore how human-computer interaction (HCI) and AI researchers conduct user studies in XAI applications based on a systematic literature review. After identifying and thoroughly analyzing 97 core papers with human-based XAI evaluations over the past five years, we categorize them along the measured characteristics of explanatory methods, namely trust, understanding, usability, and human-AI collaboration performance. Our research shows that XAI is spreading more rapidly in certain application domains, such as recommender systems than in others, but that user evaluations are still rather sparse and incorporate hardly any insights from cognitive or social sciences. Based on a comprehensive discussion of best practices, i.e., common models, design choices, and measures in user studies, we propose practical guidelines on designing and conducting user studies for XAI researchers and practitioners. Lastly, this survey also highlights several open research directions, particularly linking psychological science and human-centered XAI.

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Crossref · 10.1109/tpami.2023.3331846

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  • CAs offering technical explanations or counterfactual options, even if not fully comprehended, signal transparency.

    “CAs offering technical explanations or counterfactual options, even if not fully comprehended, signal transparency (Liao et al., 2020;Rong et al., 2024).”

    From Explainability in AI: Comparing Human-Like and System-Like Trust Repair Strategies (2026) · cites this paper as Rong et al., 2024

    Section 4.2.2 (page unavailable) says users’ perceived understanding can differ from their actual comprehension. The Usability findings (page unavailable) report that counterfactual explanations can increase perceived fairness. Neither passage establishes that conversational agents’ technical explanations or counterfactual options signal transparency when users do not fully comprehend them. (LLM, conf=0.76)

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Research works printed but not linked: 10

  1. R. Paleja, M. Ghuy, N. Ranawaka Arachchige, R. Jensen, and M. Gombolay, "The utility of explain- able ai in ad hoc human-machine teaming," NeurIPS, 2021.
  2. J. Schoeffer, N. Kuehl, and Y. Machowski, ""there is not enough information": On the effects of ex- planations on perceptions of informational fairness and trustworthiness in automated decision-making," arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.05758, 2022. · arXiv
  3. K. Natesan Ramamurthy, B. Vinzamuri, Y. Zhang, and A. Dhurandhar, "Model agnostic multilevel explana- tions," NeurIPS, 2020.
  4. J. Borowski, R. S. Zimmermann, J. Schepers, R. Geirhos, T. S. A. Wallis, M. Bethge, and W. Brendel, "Exemplary natural images explain {cnn} activations better than state-of-the-art feature visualization," in ICLR, 2021.
  5. C.-K. Yeh, B. Kim, S. O. Arik, C.-L. Li, T. Pfister, and P. Ravikumar, "On completeness-aware concept- based explanations in deep neural networks," in NeurIPS, 2019.
  6. A. Ghorbani, J. Wexler, J. Y. Zou, and B. Kim, "Towards automatic concept-based explanations," in NeurIPS, 2019.
  7. F. Hohman, A. Head, R. Caruana, R. DeLine, and S. M. Drucker, "Gamut: A design probe to understand how data scientists understand machine learning models," in CHI, 2019.
  8. G. Nguyen, M. R. Taesiri, and A. Nguyen, "Vi- sual correspondence-based explanations improve ai robustness and human-ai team accuracy," NeurIPS, 2022.
  9. C. Panigutti, A. Perotti, and D. Pedreschi, "Doctor xai: an ontology-based approach to black-box sequential data classification explanations," in ACM FAccT, 2020.
  10. A. Radford, J. Wu, R. Child, D. Luan, D. Amodei, I. Sutskever et al., "Language models are unsuper- vised multitask learners," OpenAI blog, vol. 1, no. 8, p. 9, 2019.

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Authors
Rong, Y., Leemann, T., Nguyen, T.-T., Fiedler, L., Qian, P., Unhelkar, V., Seidel, T., Kasneci, G., & Kasneci, E.
Affiliations
  • Technical University of Munich (DE)
  • University of Tübingen (DE)
  • Rice University (US)
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Published
2024-04
Volume
46
Issue
4
Pages
2104-2122
ISSN
  • 0162-8828 (ISSN-L)
  • 2160-9292
  • 1939-3539
OpenAlex
W4388624604
Cited by
278
References
208
Citations by year
2026: 120 · 2025: 98 · 2024: 57 · 2023: 3
FWCI
5.77
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Human-Automation Interaction and Safety
Keywords
explainable AI, model explanation, user study, human-centered AI, human-computer interaction, trust in AI, usability, human-AI collaboration, explanation evaluation, recommender systems
MeSH terms
Algorithms, Humans

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