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Determining the differences between two speakers' accents is a fundamental task in linguistics and speech technology research. The methodology used to measure these differences depends on the specific research area. A phonetics researcher may demonstrate accent variation by comparing vowel formants in paired recordings of individual words. These results will be interpretable, but the recordings will be time-consuming to collect and may not be representative of connected speech. Accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) research has pushed towards using accent embeddings derived from accent classification tasks. These embeddings can be produced from any speech recording, but are not readily interpretable. In this paper, we demonstrate that articulatory representations created through articulatory inversion can be used as an interpretable basis for accent comparison and that optimal transport provides a framework for accent comparison across arbitrary recording types.

In multi-party human-robot interaction, a robot must continuously decide whom to address and what to say to participate effectively in the conversation. In real-world interactions, this is challenging because several behaviours may be plausible at the same time: a robot might continue a topic with one participant, involve another through a question, or address the whole group, with the appropriate choice depending on both whom it addresses and the interaction context. Current approaches remain limited in representing uncertainty when several behaviours are plausible and in structuring decisions into semantically meaningful intermediate steps that make robot decisions easier to interpret. Addressing these, we present HiBRIDGE, a hierarchical Bayesian neural network framework for group-robot dialogue management. Its Bayesian formulation enables uncertainty-aware prediction and robust learning from limited interaction data, while the hierarchical approach formulates behaviour selection as a structured, multi-stage decision process. We further use decision-tree surrogates to investigate whether this structure can support more interpretable explanations. Across three offline group-HRI datasets, our findings show that Bayesian formulations outperform their deterministic counterparts and several state-of-the-art baselines. Next, through an online study (N=20), we show that explanations derived from the hierarchical model are rated as more helpful for understanding robot behaviour and are preferred over those derived from the flat model. Finally, through our in-person study (N=12), we demonstrate the feasibility of HiBRIDGE for autonomous real-time group interaction, with both hierarchical and flat Bayesian variants positively perceived. Overall, HiBRIDGE combines strong predictive performance with a structured decision process that supports more interpretable explanations of robot behaviour.

Long-term electricity-consumption profiles exhibit several simultaneous periodic structures, including daily, weekly, and annual cycles. This work introduces Calendar-Structured Sparse Principal Component Analysis (Calendar-SPCA), a structured representation-learning method that incorporates this known multi-periodic geometry directly into a low-dimensional factorization. The method represents the feature domain as the Cartesian product of cyclic calendar axes and combines an L1 loading penalty with graph total variation, producing sparse, locally coherent, and directly interpretable latent factors. In this study, Calendar-SPCA is applied to the interpretable analysis of long-term electricity-consumption profiles and evaluated on two independent public smart-meter datasets, GoiEner and Low Carbon London, with different population sizes and temporal resolutions. A factorial experiment characterizes the effects of sparsity and calendar coherence and examines robustness across sample size, latent dimensionality, and repeated fits. At rank 15, Calendar-SPCA retains 96.92% and 82.90% of the explained variance of rank-matched principal component analysis (PCA) in GoiEner and Low Carbon London, respectively, with mean loading sparsities of 61.95% and 81.50%. Comparisons with classical sparse PCA and sparse PCA with total variation (SPCA-TV) show that Calendar-SPCA organizes latent factors into interpretable structures over the daily, weekly, and annual calendar axes while preserving substantial low-rank information.

Depression and anxiety in older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) are frequently underdiagnosed due to limited access to care. Multimodal analysis of remote clinical interviews is a scalable screening approach, but existing methods have three limitations. First, they do not correct temporal misalignment across multimodal features extracted at different resolutions, inducing spurious cross-modal associations. Second, remote recordings exhibit uneven modality dropout, but missing values are often zero-filled, making them indistinguishable from valid near-zero measurements. Finally, they do not jointly attribute predictions to modalities, questions, and interview moments, limiting fine-grained clinical interpretation. We propose a Temporally-Aligned, Missingness-Aware, Interpretable (TAMI) multimodal fusion framework. TAMI aligns speech, language, facial, and physiological features within question-answer segments on a shared timeline, encodes modality-level missingness over time, and conditions fusion on question context. In interviews with 49 older adults with MCI, TAMI achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) scores of 0.68 (depression) and 0.69 (anxiety). Fine-grained temporal alignment of multimodal features produced the largest performance gain ($Δ{\geq}0.1$). Multi-level interpretability analysis revealed that depression classification relied on eyegaze and open-ended questions, while anxiety classification depended on eyegaze and head pose, with attribution uniformly distributed across questions. Using only responses to the open-ended questions (5.1min), the depression model achieved an AUROC score of 0.67, which was not significantly different from using the full interview (19min) ($p>0.05$). Our findings support designing interview protocols centered on open-ended questions for depression screening in older adults with MCI.

Modern AI models such as tabular foundation models and gradient-boosted ensembles can outpredict classical methods, but provide little basis for reasoning about their predictions. High-stakes decisions call for models that are both accurate and interpretable as built. Local linear modeling offers a path forward: a smooth regression function is locally well approximated by a linear one, allowing a linear fit near each query point to achieve high accuracy without sacrificing transparency. The challenges lie in learning what is "local" and developing statistical tools for interpretation. Here, we propose local distillation, in which a black-box "teacher" guides a regularized linear "student" model at each query point. The teacher (1) defines locality by upweighting training observations with similar predicted outcomes, and (2) anchors the fit with its prediction at the query point, included as a pseudo-observation whose weight is estimated from the data. For interpretation, we add a small amount of Gaussian randomization to the local objective and use refits to assess stability: selection frequencies identify reliable features at a query point, and clustering the randomized fits identifies stable subgroups across the data. Under the lasso penalty, we prove that this randomization yields feature-selection probabilities that are stable under small perturbations of the training responses. Across 17 benchmark datasets, local distillation nearly matches its AI teacher's accuracy while producing a sparse linear model at each test point. In a high-dimensional cancer gene expression example, the framework identifies patient subgroups whose local models use different genes; this heterogeneity is invisible to a global linear model, and difficult to surface in a black-box model.

The paper introduces the ante-hoc Explainable AI methodology to assess the global feature importance of the Machine Learning models used for heat demand forecasting in intelligent control of District Heating Systems, with motivation to facilitate their interpretability and trustworthiness, hence addressing the challenges related to adherence to communal standards, customer satisfaction and liability risks. Methodology includes use of four different approaches, namely intrinsic interpretability of Gradient Boosting method and selected post-hoc methods, namely Partial Dependence, Accumulated Local Effects and SHAP. None of the selected methods assume feature permutation or perturbations which can introduce bias due to introduction of random unrealistic values of data instances. Discussion of results is provided, including the assessment of complementarities where applicable, with specific interpretations in context of the district heating processes.

Public blockchain data enables large-scale DeFi-related analysis, but many existing approaches are application-specific, difficult to scale, or hard to interpret. This research proposes a scalable, application-agnostic framework for \emph{persistent behavioural pattern discovery} from large-scale blockchain activity. It constructs behaviour sentences enriched with contract, token and market context, then applies a two-step embedding process: sentence-level embeddings capture individual actions, while sequence-level embeddings capture user behaviour over time. An interpretable behavioural profiler characterizes discovered communities through behavioural motifs, routines, temporal dynamics, entity exposure, and suspiciousness evidence. Evaluation on Ethereum using over 30 million transactions shows that the framework uncovers both routine and malicious behavioural patterns, including decentralised exchange (DEX) trading, NFT activity, phishing, bot operations, oracle manipulation, and rug-pull schemes. Importantly, many patterns remain stable across independent observation windows, enabling the identification of long-term behaviours beyond a single analysis period. The proposed framework combines scalability, interpretability, and persistence analysis, supporting blockchain forensic investigation, behavioural attribution, and threat discovery.

Reinforcement learning policies are difficult to inspect, but interpreting them is a prerequisite for trustworthiness. Converting a trained policy into explicit decision-tree rules improves transparency and the resulting artifacts often remain too complex for human understanding. We present a pruning process that simplifies such rule-based policies while preserving task performance and making edits to the policy auditable. The process defines a small set of structural and usage-aware operators and evaluates candidate edits by re-executing the policy to measure return and interpretability proxies. This exposes an transformation process from complex to compact policy structures. We investigate this approach on classic control and MuJoCo benchmarks, where pruning traces reveal consistent interpretability improvements while maintaining high performance.

Vision-based guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) toward unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) supports cooperative aerial--ground robotics, but reliable continuous yaw estimation from onboard vision remains challenging because of sensing uncertainty, limited computation, and the need for interpretable control. Existing deep-learning and geometric-reconstruction approaches often require large datasets, external localization, or complex modeling assumptions, reducing transparency and deployment suitability on resource-constrained platforms. We present an interpretable fuzzy-inference framework that generates continuous yaw commands from low-dimensional features extracted from YOLO boxes: target centroid location, area, and aspect ratio. No explicit geometric modeling is required. A Mamdani fuzzy system serves as an interpretable baseline using a shoulder--triangle--shoulder input partition. It is followed by a first-order Takagi--Sugeno model with three antecedent membership terms per input, whose parameters are derived from training-set quantiles, yielding a compact 27-rule structure. Evaluation uses 6{,}169 labeled samples from a VICON motion-capture environment. Across five randomized train--test splits, the Takagi--Sugeno model achieves a test-set mean absolute error of $0.140^\circ \pm 0.003^\circ$, a root mean squared error of $0.200^\circ \pm 0.008^\circ$, and a maximum absolute error of $1.254^\circ \pm 0.121^\circ$. Within-threshold accuracies are $99.676$ for $\pm1^\circ$ and $100.000$ for both $\pm3^\circ$ and $\pm5^\circ$. Directional consistency between image-plane horizontal displacement and predicted yaw sign reaches $90.254$. These results show that the framework is transparent, data-efficient, computationally lightweight, and suitable for real-time vision-based UAV guidance toward mobile ground targets.

Traversability analysis is a fundamental capability for autonomous mobile robots operating in unstructured environments. While modern machine learning approaches such as deep neural networks and gradient-boosted trees achieve strong predictive performance, they lack interpretability and provide limited insight into the underlying terrain-robot interaction dynamics. In this paper, we propose TravKAN, a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network-based framework for fast, scalable, and interpretable traversability estimation. TravKAN represents multivariate decision functions through compositions of learnable univariate functions, enabling compact architectures and symbolic extraction of analytic expressions after training. In addition, we introduce a novel set of handcrafted features derived from the reflectivity channel of LiDAR sensors. To the best of our knowledge, reflectivity has not been systematically exploited for handcrafted traversability descriptors, despite its potential to capture material and surface properties complementary to geometric cues. We evaluate TravKAN on public, real-world urban and off-road datasets and compare it against strong baselines. TravKAN achieves strong performance across all metrics, outperforming conventional deep models and approaching the performance of XGBoost. TravKAN-Lite, i.e., TravKAN's symbolic representation, reveals meaningful nonlinear feature interactions and provides a compact, deployment-friendly, and fast analytic model. Ablation studies further show the robustness of our method to architectural variations and quantify the contribution of the proposed reflectivity-based features. These properties make TravKAN attractive for robotic systems requiring transparency, real-time computational efficiency, and interpretability in safety-critical decision-making.

A central challenge in interpreting learned decision-making systems is to determine whether their internal representations contain concepts that help explain their behavior. We report interpretability experiments for a tokenized autoregressive Transformer agent in the Game of Hidden Rules (GOHR). We focus on a compact two-rule task in which both hidden rules map object shapes to target buckets, but with different permutations. The policy is trained on episodes sampled from these two hidden rules and then evaluated with fixed weights. It is never given a rule label and does not use an explicit rule classifier; any rule information must be inferred implicitly from interaction history. In this setting, the correct rule is not identifiable before the agent tries an informative move and observes accept/reject feedback. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) trained on the agent's decision-token embeddings recover this structure. When held-out decisions are labeled by simple concepts such as the chosen shape or bucket, SAE dimensions that are highly selective for a concept cover most decisions where that concept is present. Individual SAE dimensions also correspond to interpretable strategies such as probing one rule hypothesis and switching after negative feedback.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used to diagnose neurological conditions, but its analysis usually relies on either predefined spectral features or deep neural networks. Predefined features carry a strong bias, since they fix in advance what counts as informative, while deep neural networks and foundation models are hard to interpret and need large amounts of data and compute. We present bag-of-waves, an interpretable framework that learns a small dictionary of recurring EEG waveform templates, called atoms, using shift-invariant k-means without labels. The continuous EEG is then turned into a sequence of atom tokens, whose counts feed a simple downstream classifier or clustering step. We extend this representation in two ways: we add atom-to-atom transitions, which we call n- grams, to capture temporal structure, and we move from single-channel atoms to regional and cross-channel spatial atoms for the multichannel case. We test the method on three complementary datasets, each probing a different aspect: single-channel mouse genotype clustering with only sixteen animals (the low-data and temporal case), resting-state dementia classification (the spatial case), and the TUEV benchmark, a six-way classification of clinical EEG events (a high-data comparison against strong deep and foundation baselines). Across all three datasets, bag-of-waves achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art deep and foundation models. Yet, it operates with a fraction of the parameter count and provides full interpretability: because every atom corresponds to an inspectable waveform, the method explicitly recovers known clinical morphologies that a neurophysiologist can directly validate. Its main advantage is that it works in the low-data regime where heavier models are a poor fit.

Collision anticipation in autonomous driving requires not only accurate early warnings but also interpretable reasoning about what risk factors are being tracked and how risk evolves over time. Existing methods fall short in this regard: feature-driven models are opaque, post-hoc explanations often lack fidelity, and concept-based methods are mostly designed for static recognition rather than dynamic driving scenes. We propose CARA (Concept-Aware Risk Attention), an intrinsically interpretable spatio-temporal framework for collision anticipation. CARA derives domain-grounded risk concepts from accident narratives, aligns them with video frames via vision-language similarity, and organizes them into evolving concept trajectories. These trajectories provide explicit risk evidence that guides spatial attention, temporal attention, and anticipation, allowing semantic concepts to directly influence both where the model attends and how it predicts risk over time. By treating semantic risk factors as dynamic intermediate evidence rather than auxiliary post-hoc explanations, CARA tightly couples interpretability with the predictive process. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that CARA consistently improves anticipation accuracy and warning earliness over strong baselines, while providing sparse and semantically grounded concept evidence.

We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Interpretable Learning (RAIL), a probabilistic meta-learning framework for zero-shot generation of task-specific interpretable models that synthesizes coefficient-space structure from natural-language task descriptions and a memory of previously learned task-specific predictors. RAIL retrieves related source tasks, transfers structure through coefficient space, and generates a new predictor in the original diagnostic-feature space, enabling zero-shot and few-shot clinical procedure prediction with feature-level explanations. Its probabilistic formulation provides uncertainty over retrieval, model coefficients, and predictions, supporting reliability-aware deployment: uncertain predictions or unstable explanations can be flagged for additional clinical review rather than treated as automatic decisions. This makes RAIL particularly suited for healthcare settings, where prediction tasks are highly long-tailed, new clinical targets arise frequently, and models must remain inspectable, uncertainty-aware, and compatible with human oversight. Across long-tailed clinical procedure prediction tasks, RAIL maintains reliable performance across data-availability regimes: it achieves 73.4% accuracy in the held-out zero-shot settings, where no supervised task-specific model can be trained, and remains near 73.2% accuracy in the extreme few-shot regime with only 2-4 examples, where supervised task-specific models perform close to chance. RAIL further benefits from clinically informed task representations and yields retrieval, uncertainty, and coefficient-level diagnostics that make model behavior more transparent. These results suggest a path toward scalable clinical prediction systems that can adapt to new tasks while preserving interpretability and reliability.

Air pollution and climate-related stressors are increasingly important concerns for respiratory health, especially in settings with unequal environmental exposure and healthcare capacity. This study evaluates an interpretable machine learning framework for predicting respiratory disease rates and air-quality status using structured country-level weekly data. Two supervised learning tasks were considered: regression of respiratory disease rate per 100,000 population and binary classification of air-quality status. Nine regression models and nine classification models were compared using nested cross-validation. Model interpretation was conducted using SHAP values, and subgroup analysis was performed across income levels and geographic regions. The results showed that PM2.5 concentration was the dominant predictor of respiratory disease rate, with linear and regularized linear models achieving the strongest regression performance. For air-quality classification, models achieved high balanced accuracy when PM2.5 was included, but performance decreased substantially when PM2.5 was removed, indicating strong dependence on pollutant-related information. SHAP analysis showed that, without PM2.5, socioeconomic and meteorological variables such as GDP per capita, precipitation, and healthcare access became more influential. Subgroup analysis showed similar aggregate regression error across income groups, but PM2.5 contributed more strongly to predictions in lower-middle-income countries. These results show that model accuracy alone is not sufficient for climate-health prediction. Interpretable models can help identify dominant pollution-related signals, test whether results depend on key pollutant variables, and show whether prediction patterns differ across socioeconomic groups.

Black-box models limit the adoption of artificial intelligence in medicine because their predictions are difficult to interpret and reproduce. We present a statistically grounded framework for interpretable, rule-based clinical classification using the Bernoulli Naïve Bayes (BNB) model. Supervised chi-square-guided binarization converts continuous variables into binary indicators by selecting thresholds that maximize association with the clinical outcome within the training folds, which allows BNB to operate on continuous medical data without sacrificing transparency. On three benchmark datasets, Pima Indians Diabetes, Wisconsin Breast Cancer, and Heart Failure Prediction, the framework reached areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.800, 0.984, and 0.919, respectively. Probabilistic reliability was assessed with a leakage-safe cross-validated calibration analysis reporting Brier score and calibration intercept and slope, and post-hoc beta calibration improved probability calibration across datasets. These results indicate that an interpretable, statistically motivated framework can perform comparably to more complex models while providing explicit decision rules expressed in clinical units and calibrated risk estimates. A complete worked example further shows that model inference can be reproduced from a printed reference table using only basic arithmetic, without software or proprietary tools, supporting trustworthy and auditable use of artificial intelligence in clinical settings.

Foundation models provide powerful representations for brain MRI analysis, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret in anatomically meaningful terms. Clinical assessment of brain MRI is commonly organized around anatomically defined structures and regional abnormalities, whereas conventional explanation methods typically produce voxel- or patch-level importance maps that do not explicitly quantify the contributions of individual brain regions. To address this mismatch, we propose RegionFM, an interpretable framework that integrates anatomical segmentation with brain MRI foundation-model embeddings. RegionFM first divides each MRI scan into anatomical regions and constructs a separate MRI volume for each region. A frozen foundation model then encodes each region into an embedding, and a region-additive logistic model combines these embeddings such that every anatomical region contributes an explicit scalar term to the final prediction. This formulation supports both subject-level and cohort-level analyses of regional contributions. We evaluate RegionFM on cognitive-impairment classification using embeddings from multiple pretrained brain MRI foundation models. The results show that RegionFM maintains performance comparable to less interpretable fine-tuning approaches while providing anatomically grounded explanations. Randomized embedding ablations yield near-chance performance, indicating that the predictions rely on meaningful structure captured by the foundation-model embeddings rather than simple feature statistics. Overall, RegionFM better aligns model explanations with anatomy-based clinical reasoning while maintaining competitive predictive performance.

Electronic health record (EHR) data are inherently multimodal, and leveraging multiple modalities can improve predictive performance. However, most existing approaches rely on deep fusion, which obscures how individual modalities contribute to predictions and limits the interpretability of multimodal reasoning. We propose an explicit multimodal routing framework for clinical prediction that enables interpretable, robust, and auditable reasoning across three EHR modalities: structured longitudinal variables (L), clinical notes (N), and chest X-rays (I). Our model constructs discrete unimodal, directional bimodal, and trimodal routes to capture both individual modality signals and asymmetric cross-modal interactions. To audit multimodal reasoning and assess robustness, we introduce inference-time route masking, which simulates missing modalities and reweights the remaining routes without retraining. We analyze changes in performance and routing weights under these scenarios to understand model decision-making. We evaluate our framework on multi-label phenotype prediction (K = 25) and binary ICU mortality prediction using trimodal patient stays from MIMIC-IV, revealing systematic differences in modality reliance across clinical condition groups. Overall, our framework offers a transparent, auditable, and practical approach to multimodal clinical prediction, providing interpretability, robustness, and insights into how different data sources drive model decisions.

In the digital era, Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the most widely used file formats for storing and exchanging digital documents due to its platform independence and rich functionality. However, these same capabilities have also made PDF files an attractive attack vector for cyberattackers, who embed malicious code within seemingly legitimate documents to compromise target systems. This paper presents a novel interpretable Tsetlin Machine (TM)-based framework for PDF malware detection. The proposed framework extracts salient features from PDF documents through static analysis without executing the files and employs rule-based learning to accurately classify benign and malicious PDF documents. Numerical evaluation on the RIT-PDFMal-2026 dataset demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance, attaining an accuracy of 98.02% compared with several ML classifiers and existing methods. Moreover, the proposed framework provides intrinsic interpretability by transparently explaining its classification decisions. The combination of competitive detection performance, computational efficiency, and intrinsic interpretability makes the proposed framework a promising solution for practical PDF malware detection.

Over the last few years, there has been an increased interest in making machine learning models more interpretable. Although a great deal of effort goes into developing techniques for interpreting the interactions learned by a given model, fewer studies focus on assessing the quality of such explanations. Even fewer focus on how to adjust the model to produce explanations faithful to prior knowledge, a process known as explanation-guided learning. Furthermore, most approaches in this area focus on classification problems and usually assume prior knowledge about which input features or regions are most important. In this work, we introduce a new approach to steering neural networks based on partial dependence, such that their average response to certain features aligns with specific functional domain knowledge about the problem. We empirically demonstrate on a range of regression problems, including dynamical systems forecasting, that models whose training has been controlled using our method perform better than unconstrained models and are more data-efficient. Moreover, we highlight that interpretations obtained from the former actually align with the user-provided knowledge, whereas those obtained from the latter do not.

Inherently interpretable classifiers for tabular data typically rely on sparse features, rules, or patterns that users can inspect directly. The marginal feature-screening step common to these methods can discard variables whose predictive value emerges only through joint configurations with other variables. We present Interaction Aware Interpretable Machine Learning (IAIML), a framework that addresses this limitation through three coordinated mechanisms: adaptive per-feature discretization, finite-grid pairwise interaction scoring, and a partitioned explanation budget. Detected interactions are routed through one of two strategies: relaxing the screening filter so that interaction-supported variables enter the pattern search, or constructing explicit pair terms for a sparse downstream classifier. On a 40-dataset panel comprising 24 real-world tabular benchmarks and 16 synthetic interaction stress tests, evaluated under nested cross-validation, IAIML achieves mean AUC within 1.4 points of tuned gradient-boosted ensembles while requiring roughly 14--28 times fewer fitted explanation components. On datasets with strong pairwise interaction structure and low marginal signal, IAIML outperforms all baselines. Among compact interpretable methods, IAIML is comparable to RuleFit in AUC and component count and is less expensive to tune. EBM obtains a small but significant AUC advantage across the full panel, with a substantially larger lookup-table footprint. Performance degrades on datasets requiring higher-order interactions beyond the pairwise scope. Component-isolated ablations confirm that adaptive discretization and interaction-aware admission each contribute incrementally. These results support IAIML as a compact, interaction-aware framework appropriate for settings where bounded explanation size and controlled treatment of feature interactions are design requirements.

A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to understand how neural networks work and what each individual component does. Dominant circuit-finding approaches focus on a specific behavior and reverse-engineer the role of components on the associated sub-distribution. However, past work has shown that components can have different functions that are active on different subsets of the input distribution. In this work we ask whether a single weight can be understood globally across the full training distribution by characterizing when it matters (the inputs on which ablating it changes the model's predictions). We introduce an automated LLM pipeline that writes a short, human-readable description of when a weight matters and verifies it on held-out text, crediting a weight only if its description generalizes. Across two sparse and two dense transformers, the fraction of weights that are interpretable (in this sense) is higher in sparse transformers than in dense ones, a gap that widens once unreliable descriptions are discarded. Our results show that a meaningful fraction of a sparse transformer model's weights can be interpreted: 12 to 31% of weights have a single short description that identifies what the weight is used for.

Deep learning has achieved remarkable performance in medical image segmentation, yet it suffers from critical limitations: mathematical intractability, substantial parameter requirements, and lack of clinical interpretability. We propose RadiomicNet, a novel two-stream hybrid architecture that enhances standard deep learning by integrating handcrafted radiomics features directly into the segmentation learning process. The key contribution is the Radiomics Attention Gate (RAG), which leverages Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features to modulate skip-connection attention in a lightweight MobileNetV2-based encoder-decoder, providing ante-hoc interpretability without post-hoc approximations. A novel Radiomics Consistency Loss further enforces alignment between texture complexity and prediction uncertainty, reducing Expected Calibration Error (ECE) from 0.142 to 0.118. RadiomicNet achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.763 +/- 0.231 on the Breast Ultrasound Images (BUSI) dataset and 0.854 +/- 0.112 on Kvasir-SEG, outperforming U-KAN by 1.2% and 1.8%, respectively (p < 0.05, Wilcoxon signed-rank test), with only 3.27M parameters, 9.5x fewer than standard U-Net and 4.3x fewer than U-KAN. Gradient-based feature importance analysis reveals that GLCM dissimilarity (15.24%), GLCM energy (14.56%), and LBP entropy (11.49%) are the dominant radiomics cues, providing clinically meaningful explanations for segmentation decisions. The proposed approach demonstrates that compact, interpretable models grounded in domain knowledge can deliver state-of-the-art segmentation performance with substantially reduced computational overhead.

Encrypted traffic classification has achieved strong performance, but its decision process remains difficult to interpret. Existing methods usually combine flow statistics, packet sequences, and byte-level representations into opaque latent features, making it unclear which type of evidence actually drives the prediction. In this paper, we propose Traffic-CBM, a structurally interpretable multimodal framework for encrypted traffic classification. Instead of directly fusing heterogeneous traffic signals into a black-box representation, Traffic-CBM organizes them into a unified hierarchical concept space. These concepts are not manually annotated semantic attributes; rather, they are scalar evidence summaries constrained by predefined traffic evidence groups. More specifically, grouped flow statistics are mapped to statistical concepts, dedicated temporal encoders learn temporal concepts from disjoint feature subspaces, and byte-level evidence is further organized into packet-level and cross-packet concepts. This design turns heterogeneous traffic evidence into an explicit concept representation and makes different levels of traffic evidence easier to analyze. We evaluate Traffic-CBM on multiple encrypted traffic benchmarks. Results show that it achieves competitive and balanced classification performance while providing a clearer structural interpretation interface than conventional end-to-end fusion models. Further analyses suggest that the learned concept space is actively used in the prediction process and provides a clearer structural explanation of multimodal traffic evidence.

Spatiotemporal systems comprise a collection of spatially distributed yet interdependent entities each generating unique dynamic signals. Highly sophisticated methods have been proposed in recent years delivering state-of-the-art (SOTA) forecasts but few have focused on interpretability. To address this, we propose the Future Decomposition Network (FDN), a novel forecast model capable of (a) providing interpretable predictions through classification (b) revealing latent activity patterns in the target time-series and (c) delivering forecasts competitive with SOTA methods at a fraction of their memory and runtime cost. We conduct comprehensive analyses on FDN for multiple datasets from hydrologic, traffic, and energy systems, demonstrating its improved accuracy and interpretability.

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations. To address this gap, we propose UniDrive, a unified visual-language and grounding framework for interpretable risk understanding in autonomous driving. UniDrive combines a temporal reasoning branch that models scene dynamics from multi-frame visual input with a high-resolution perception branch that preserves fine-grained spatial details from the latest frame. The two branches are integrated through a gated cross-attention fusion module, enabling dynamic context to be aligned with precise spatial evidence. Based on the fused representation, UniDrive jointly generates natural-language risk descriptions and grounded bounding-box outputs for risk objects. Experiments on the DRAMA-Reasoning benchmark show that UniDrive outperforms representative image-based and video-based baselines in both captioning and risk-object grounding. In particular, UniDrive achieves the best overall performance on the validation split and demonstrates clear advantages in small-object localization, zero-shot generalization to NuScenes and BDD100K, and human-rated interpretability and trustworthiness. These results suggest that explicitly combining temporal semantics and high-resolution perception provides a stronger foundation for interpretable and safety-oriented autonomous driving systems. The code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/unidrive-dev.

The clinical diagnosis of skin diseases is susceptible to interference from inter-class similarity of skin lesions, and over-reliance on clinicians'experience easily leads to subjective bias. Although existing deep learning aided diagnosis methods achieve competitive accuracy, they suffer from the black-box opacity of Vision Transformer (ViT) and poor adaptability to medical few-shot scenarios. Moreover, mainstream explainable algorithms generally face the bottleneck of significant accuracy degradation when improving interpretability. This paper proposes an interpretable ViT (IViT) constrained by Quadratic Programming (QP). The introduced pre-trained transfer learning adapts to few-shot feature extraction. A discrete QP feature selection framework is constructed to screen generic and discriminative features consistent with clinical diagnostic logic. A multi-objective loss function is designed to reduce feature redundancy and optimize activation distribution while preserving classification performance. Experimental results on six standard skin disease datasets show that IViT achieves an accuracy of 93.80%, only 0.21% lower than the baseline, with feature redundancy reduced by 29.5%. Its core activation regions are consistent with clinically concerned lesion areas. The proposed model balances accuracy and interpretability, providing a reliable solution for the clinical deployment of few-shot intelligent skin disease diagnosis.

Due to the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, there is a clear demand for intelligent, scalable, and autonomous approaches to disaster damage assessment. Existing methods, largely based on supervised learning and task-specific fine-tuning, struggle to generalize under domain shifts, long-tailed data distributions, and heterogeneous geospatial data sources, especially in disaster scenarios. They also often lack the ability to integrate and reason across multimodal geospatial information, such as satellite images and street-view images. In this paper, we introduce RAPID, a reproducible multi-agent pipeline for interpretable disaster damage assessment, including damage-level assessment, damage-type interpretation, and actionable suggestions for response, remediation, and recovery. RAPID coordinates specialized agents to perform cross-view understanding, image restoration, structured damage recognition, and geographical reasoning across heterogeneous data modalities. Without task-specific fine-tuning, RAPID supports zero-shot damage assessment by jointly using complementary information from remote sensing and ground-level perspectives. The system produces fine-grained, interpretable assessments and automatically generates location-specific, decision-relevant disaster reports to support early-stage emergency response. We evaluate RAPID across hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and earthquakes using multiple cross-view imagery inputs, including pre- and post-disaster street-view images, post-disaster remote sensing imagery, and street-view image pairs. Experiments show that RAPID achieves 0.92 overall accuracy for multi-disaster type classification and up to 0.627 for cross-view damage severity prediction, highlighting its potential as a foundational framework for autonomous disaster intelligence.

Deep neural network-based automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems achieve impressive performance but their embedding representations remain opaque, lacking a structured and perceptually verifiable explanation of the vocal characteristics they encode. Existing approaches either require annotation of speaker attributes or introduce alternative representations whose interpretability is unvalidated with listeners. We propose Listenable Interpretable Speaker Embeddings (LISE), a label-free framework that decomposes pretrained speaker embeddings into a small set of components. This decomposition yields a structured representation that supports the analysis of what information has been encoded by speaker embeddings. LISE preserves ASV performance with negligible EER degradation on x-vector and ECAPA-TDNN. Crucially, the interpretability of these components for human listeners is demonstrated through listening experiments, where participants distinguished speakers with 83.9% accuracy.

Video-based seizure detection is essential for the management of epilepsy patients, offering a non-invasive complement to electroencephalography. While several deep learning approaches have been developed for video-based seizure detection, none are inherently interpretable, limiting their adoption and translation into clinical practice. We present, to our knowledge, the first exploration of a neurosymbolic framework for video-based seizure detection that directly addresses this gap. Our approach (1) extracts patient-centric skeleton sequences from epilepsy monitoring units via a prompt-guided foundation model, (2) predicts binary spatio-temporal concept activations grounded in clinical motor semiology guidelines, and (3) composes them via differentiable logic into interpretable Boolean rules with auditable contributions. Furthermore, to mitigate false positives arising from the traditional binary formulation (seizure vs.\ non-seizure), we sub-classify non-seizure segments into clinically relevant normal activities, providing the model with fine-grained discriminative supervision. Evaluated on two public seizure video benchmarks, our framework achieves 89.78% sensitivity with 0.06 false detections per hour on SAHZU and 85.27%,0.09 on IEEE, while producing complete three-level interpretability: every prediction decomposes into which motor primitives were detected, how they were logically composed, and how much each rule contributed to the clinical decision. We publicly release all annotations, extracted pose sequences, our data pipeline and code, https://github.com/Mr-TalhaIlyas/CDSD/.