Conversational versus Dashboard Explainable AI for UAV Intrusion Detection: An Empirical Study of Operator Trust and Reliance

During thDuring the last few years, the term Mechanistic Interpretability, a specific area, under the umbrella of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), has been introduced, to explain the decisions made by complex machine learning (ML) models in critical systems like UAV intrusion detection systems (UAVIDS). In this paper, we apply best-practices for data pre-processing and examine a wide range of tree-ensembles, deep neural networks, hybrid stacking models and the latest ensemble neural networks to detect intrusions in UAV, with stratified 10-fold cross validation. With our top-performing model, XGBoost, we proceed to Shapley Additive explanations (SHAP), to analyze the global and local feature importances and understand which features, each attack targets, to mimic normal traffic and where the misclassifications occur. Furthermore a distribution analysis follows, by visually comparing violin plots and the curves of kernel density estimations. With the Westfall-Young permutation test for multiple comparisons, the Bandwidth optimization of the KDEs and the selection of Jensen-Shannon Distance for the test, we discover the true causes of false predictions, observed in Wormhole and Blackhole attacks in UAVIDS-2025. The findings provide robust, reliable and explainable models for UAV intrusion detection, along with statistical insights, which capture and clarify the masked nature of the attacks, regarding the challenge of Density Support Intersection, between these attacks, in this dataset.

In IoT-enabled smart-city settings, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are evolving from passive sensing platforms into cyber-physical decision makers that must respect operational rules under degraded observations and ambiguous language. Existing UAV and multimodal benchmarks cover aerial perception, navigation, collaboration, and task reasoning, but rarely test whether physical evidence, protocol constraints, and action risk stay coupled at critical decisions. We introduce MulRobBench, an offline, protocol-conditioned benchmark for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) UAV agents that links real UAV multimodal observations, protocol-level security-policy constraints, and action-level cyber-physical safety within an auditable decision contract. The evaluation set contains 3,024 samples spanning 17 task-taxonomy nodes and 12 metric scoring dimensions, organized around context understanding, multimodal evidence arbitration, degradation-aware reasoning, and risk-aware action planning. MulRobBench reports controlled semantic scores alongside strict structural diagnostics for policy compliance, formatting, unsafe actions, parsing, and dimension-level validity. Across 17 uniformly audited models, the best semantic protocol-decision score reaches 0.5141 and the best strict mean scoring-dimension accuracy reaches 0.1599. A matched 20-anchor modality-removal study changes 4-15 action selections per model, showing both visual and textual inputs influence decisions while the strongest input condition varies across metrics. Per-dimension and conditional analyses identify modality-trust selection, constraint extraction, strong glare, missing data, and high-entropy operator shorthand as principal sources of action instability. The central challenge is thus stable coupling of degraded evidence, security-policy constraints, and risk-bearing action, not isolated scene recognition.

Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms have significant potential for applications such as Search and Rescue (SAR) and environmental monitoring, but their real-world deployment is limited by a lack of situational awareness, intermittent connectivity, and significant cybersecurity risks. Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a shift from standalone Large Language Model (LLM) toward closed-loop cognitive architectures that integrate perception, memory, reasoning/planning, and action to enable adaptive, goal-directed swarm behavior. Within this framework, Agentic AI provides a unifying structure for autonomous and adaptive swarm operations while expanding the system attack surface compared to conventional AI systems. This paper proposes LLM-Centric Agentic AI for UAV Swarms (LAUS) and reviews key enabling technologies such as onboard and edge computing, 5G/6G connectivity, multimodal intelligence, and cybersecurity mechanisms, and analyzes threats such as Priority Manipulation Attacks (PMA) that can distort decision-making and degrade network performance. Finally, it identifies open research challenges, including hallucination-resistant reasoning, onboard LLM deployment under SWaP constraints, and standardized security benchmarks for perception-reasoning attacks in agentic UAV systems.