Cited by 220Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Data Visualization and AnalyticsUsability and User Interface Design

The effects of example-based explanations in a machine learning interface

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Cai, Carrie J., Jongejan, Jonas, Holbrook, Jess·2019·Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

Abstract

The black-box nature of machine learning algorithms can make their predictions difficult to understand and explain to end-users. In this paper, we propose and evaluate two kinds of example-based explanations in the visual domain, normative explanations and comparative explanations (Figure 1), which automatically surface examples from the training set of a deep neural net sketch-recognition algorithm. To investigate their effects, we deployed these explanations to 1150 users on QuickDraw, an online platform where users draw images and see whether a recognizer has correctly guessed the intended drawing. When the algorithm failed to recognize the drawing, those who received normative explanations felt they had a better understanding of the system, and perceived the system to have higher capability. However, comparative explanations did not always improve perceptions of the algorithm, possibly because they sometimes exposed limitations of the algorithm and may have led to surprise. These findings suggest that examples can serve as a vehicle for explaining algorithmic behavior, but point to relative advantages and disadvantages of using different kinds of examples, depending on the goal.

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  • Other studies suggest example-based explanations are better at helping people detect model errors, usually by recognizing the dissimilarity between the instance and selected examples.

    “Wang and Yin [82] found that example-based explanations underperform feature-based explanations for improving appropriate reliance, though other studies suggest example-based explanations are better at helping people detect model errors [11,13,49], usually by recognizing the dissimilarity between the instance and selected examples.”

    From Understanding the Role of Human Intuition on Reliance in Human-AI Decision-Making with Explanations (2023) · cites this paper as [13]

    The Results and Discussion (sections 8–9; page numbers unavailable) suggest that comparative examples sometimes exposed algorithmic limitations. But the study did not measure whether people detected errors better with example-based explanations, and it attributes the surprise to examples that were visually similar but semantically unrelated—not usually to dissimilarity between the drawing and selected examples. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Cai et al. [3] found that comparative explanation can lead to better discovery of the limitations of the AI, compared to normative explanation.

    “A study conducted by Cai et al. [3] found that comparative explanation, by comparisons with examples in alternative classes, can lead to better discovery of the limitations of the AI, compared to normative explanation that describes examples in the intended class.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. [6]6. Dumitru Erhan, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, and Pascal Vincent. 2009. Visu- alizing higher-layer features of a deep network. University of Montreal 1341, 3 (2009), 1.
  2. [10]10. Jonathan L Herlocker, Joseph A Konstan, and John Riedl. 2000. Explaining col- laborative filtering recommendations. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 241-250.
  3. [21]21. Tim Miller. 2017. Explanation in artificial intelligence: insights from the social sciences. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07269 (2017). · arXiv

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Authors
Cai, C. J., Jongejan, J., & Holbrook, J.
Affiliations
Google (United States) (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Publisher
ACM
Published
2019-03-17
Pages
258-262
OpenAlex
W2916797267
Cited by
220
References
32
Citations by year
2026: 13 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 42 · 2023: 38 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 34 · 2020: 28 · 2019: 4
FWCI
9.66
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Data Visualization and Analytics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
Keywords
example-based explanations, explainable machine learning, normative explanation, sketch recognition, deep neural network, black-box algorithms, QuickDraw

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