PREF-XAI: Preference-Based Personalized Rule Explanations of Black-Box Machine Learning Models
Authors: Salvatore Greco, Jacek Karolczak, Roman Słowiński, Jerzy Stefanowski
Organizations: University of Catania, Department of Economics and Business, Corso Italia 55, Catania, 95129, Italy · Poznan University of Technology, Institute of Computing Science,2026 Piotrowo 2, Poznań, 60-965, Poland · bPoznan University of Technology, Institute of Computing Science,2026 Piotrowo 2, Poznań, 60-965, Poland · cSystems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Newelska 6, Warsaw, 01-447, Poland
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has predominantly focused on generating model-centric explanations that approximate the behavior of black-box models. However, such explanations often overlook a fundamental aspect of interpretability: different users require different explanations depending on their goals, preferences, and cognitive constraints. Although recent work has explored user-centric and personalized explanations, most existing approaches rely on heuristic adaptations or implicit user modeling, lacking a principled framework for representing and learning individual preferences. In this paper, we consider Preference-Based Explainable Artificial Intelligence (PREF-XAI), a novel perspective that reframes explanation as a preference-driven decision problem. Within PREF-XAI, explanations are not treated as fixed outputs, but as alternatives to be evaluated and selected according to user-specific criteria. In the PREF-XAI perspective, here we propose a methodology that combines rule-based explanations with formal preference learning. User preferences are elicited through a ranking of a small set of candidate explanations and modeled via an additive utility function inferred using robust ordinal regression. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that PREF-XAI can accurately reconstruct user preferences from limited feedback, identify highly relevant explanations, and discover novel explanatory rules not initially considered by the user. Beyond the proposed methodology, this work establishes a connection between XAI and preference learning, opening new directions for interactive and adaptive explanation systems.
Explainable AI (XAI) aims to improve user understanding and decisions when using AI models. However, despite innovations in XAI, recent user evaluations reveal that this goal remains elusive. Understanding human cognition can help explain why users struggle to effectively use AI explanations. Focusing on reasoning on structured (tabular) data, we examined various reasoning strategies for different XAI methods (none, feature importance, feature attribution) in the decision task of anticipating AI decisions (i.e., forward simulation). We i) elicited reasoning strategies from a formative user study, and ii) collected decisions from a summative user study. Using cognitive modeling, we implemented the processes underlying each reasoning strategy and evaluated their alignment with human decision-making. We found that our models better fit human decisions than baseline machine learning proxies, providing insights into which reasoning strategies are (in)effective. We then demonstrate how the fitted model can be used to form hypotheses and investigate research questions that are costly to study with real human participants. This work contributes to debugging human understanding of XAI, informing the future development of more usable and interpretable AI explanations.
Explainable AI (XAI) methods identify which features are relevant to a model's predictions but often fail to clarify why certain decisions are made. In this work, we present a novel method that integrates causality with argument-based reasoning to explain why models may be making predictions. Our approach first identifies causal relationships among variables using causal discovery methods and then translates these into a Bipolar Argumentation Framework (BAF) to represent supportive and opposing interactions among features. By using semi-stable semantics, we find extensions of features that explain why certain outcomes may have been chosen. We demonstrate our method on two benchmark datasets and compare its results against standard post-hoc explainability approaches.
Explaining machine-learning models is increasingly important for decision-making and consumer trust, yet it is widely believed to come at a cost: existing Explainable AI (XAI) methods suffer from a persistent accuracy-explainability trade-off. We argue that this trade-off is not fundamental, but an artifact of treating explanation and prediction as separate objectives; when properly coupled, they become complementary, so that equipping a model to explain itself improves, rather than degrades, its accuracy. We introduce the Rashomon Explanation paradigm, which builds a set of faithful, prediction-guiding explanations rather than a single one, and prove that this set is generally non-empty and that explanation fidelity bounds the performance of the models it guides. To explore this set, we propose RashomonLLM, an Explanation-Prediction-Reflection agentic workflow that generates explanations in natural language by iteratively aligning them with predictions, and we prove it converges and recovers the full set. Across customer-churn classification, clinical survival regression, and industrial click-through prediction on large-scale live-streaming logs, RashomonLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prediction and XAI baselines on both accuracy and explanation quality, with gains driven by explanation fidelity and robust to distribution shifts, temporal splits, and seeds. Our framework thus advances business performance while laying the groundwork for consumer trust.