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Research on Explainable Artificial Intelligence has recently started exploring the idea of producing explanations that, rather than being expressed in terms of low-level features, are encoded in terms of interpretable concepts learned from data. How to reliably acquire such concepts is, however, still fundamentally unclear. An agreed-upon notion of concept interpretability is missing, with the result that concepts used by both post hoc explainers and concept-based neural networks are acquired through a variety of mutually incompatible strategies. Critically, most of these neglect the human side of the problem: a representation is understandable only insofar as it can be understood by the human at the receiving end. The key challenge in human-interpretable representation learning (hrl) is how to model and operationalize this human element. In this work, we propose a mathematical framework for acquiring interpretable representations suitable for both post hoc explainers and concept-based neural networks. Our formalization of hrl builds on recent advances in causal representation learning and explicitly models a human stakeholder as an external observer. This allows us derive a principled notion of alignment between the machine’s representation and the vocabulary of concepts understood by the human. In doing so, we link alignment and interpretability through a simple and intuitive name transfer game, and clarify the relationship between alignment and a well-known property of representations, namely disentanglement. We also show that alignment is linked to the issue of undesirable correlations among concepts, also known as concept leakage, and to content-style separation, all through a general information-theoretic reformulation of these properties. Our conceptualization aims to bridge the gap between the human and algorithmic sides of interpretability and establish a stepping stone for new research on human-interpretable representations.

Over the last decade, several regulatory bodies have started requiring the disclosure of non-financial information from publicly listed companies, in light of the investors’ increasing attention to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues. Publicly released information on sustainability practices is often disclosed in diverse, unstructured, and multi-modal documentation. This poses a challenge in efficiently gathering and aligning the data into a unified framework to derive insights related to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Thus, using Information Extraction (IE) methods becomes an intuitive choice for delivering insightful and actionable data to stakeholders. In this study, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs), In-Context Learning, and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm to extract structured insights related to ESG aspects from companies’ sustainability reports. We then leverage graph-based representations to conduct statistical analyses concerning the extracted insights. These analyses revealed that ESG criteria cover a wide range of topics, exceeding 500, often beyond those considered in existing categorizations, and are addressed by companies through a variety of initiatives. Moreover, disclosure similarities emerged among companies from the same region or sector, validating ongoing hypotheses in the ESG literature. Lastly, by incorporating additional company attributes into our analyses, we investigated which factors impact the most on companies’ ESG ratings, showing that ESG disclosure affects the obtained ratings more than other financial or company data.

Temporal graphs are structures which model relational data between entities that change over time. Due to the complex structure of data, mining statistically significant temporal subgraphs, also known as temporal motifs, is a challenging task. In this work, we present an efficient technique for extracting temporal motifs in temporal networks. Our method is based on the novel notion of egocentric temporal neighborhoods, namely multi-layer structures centered on an ego node. Each temporal layer of the structure consists of the first-order neighborhood of the ego node, and corresponding nodes in sequential layers are connected by an edge. The strength of this approach lies in the possibility of encoding these structures into a unique bit vector, thus bypassing the problem of graph isomorphism in searching for temporal motifs. This allows our algorithm to mine substantially larger motifs with respect to alternative approaches. Furthermore, by bringing the focus on the temporal dynamics of the interactions of a specific node, our model allows to mine temporal motifs which are visibly interpretable. Experiments on a number of complex networks of social interactions confirm the advantage of the proposed approach over alternative non-egocentric solutions. The egocentric procedure is indeed more efficient in revealing similarities and discrepancies among different social environments, independently of the different technologies used to collect data, which instead affect standard non-egocentric measures.

Endovascular Aneurysm Repair (EVAR) is a minimally invasive procedure crucial for treating abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA), where precise pre-operative planning is essential. Current clinical methods rely on manual measurements, which are time-consuming and prone to errors. Although AI solutions are increasingly being developed to automate aspects of these processes, most existing approaches primarily focus on computing volumes and diameters, falling short of delivering a fully automated pre-operative analysis. This work presents BRAVE (Blood Vessels Recognition and Aneurysms Visualization Enhancement), the first comprehensive AI-driven solution for vascular segmentation and AAA analysis using pre-operative CTA scans. BRAVE offers exhaustive segmentation, identifying both the primary abdominal aorta and secondary vessels, often overlooked by existing methods, providing a complete view of the vascular structure. The pipeline performs advanced volumetric analysis of the aneurysm sac, quantifying thrombotic tissue and calcifications, and automatically identifies the proximal and distal sealing zones, critical for successful EVAR procedures. BRAVE enables fully automated processing, reducing manual intervention and improving clinical workflow efficiency. Trained on a multi-center open-access dataset, it demonstrates generalizability across different CTA protocols and patient populations, ensuring robustness in diverse clinical settings. This solution saves time, ensures precision, and standardizes the process, enhancing vascular surgeons’ decision-making.

Background The classical view on eukaryotic gene expression proposes the scheme of a forward flow for which fluctuations in mRNA levels upon a stimulus contribute to determine variations in mRNA availability for translation. Here we address this issue by simultaneously profiling with microarrays the total mRNAs (the transcriptome) and the polysome-associated mRNAs (the translatome) after EGF treatment of human cells, and extending the analysis to other 19 different transcriptome/translatome comparisons in mammalian cells following different stimuli or undergoing cell programs. Results Triggering of the EGF pathway results in an early induction of transcriptome and translatome changes, but 90% of the significant variation is limited to the translatome and the degree of concordant changes is less than 5%. The survey of other 19 different transcriptome/translatome comparisons shows that extensive uncoupling is a general rule, in terms of both RNA movements and inferred cell activities, with a strong tendency of translation-related genes to be controlled purely at the translational level. By different statistical approaches, we finally provide evidence of the lack of dependence between changes at the transcriptome and translatome levels. Conclusions We propose a model of diffused independency between variation in transcript abundances and variation in their engagement on polysomes, which implies the existence of specific mechanisms to couple these two ways of regulating gene expression.

Various studies have investigated the predictability of different aspects of human behavior such as mobility patterns, social interactions, and shopping and online behaviors. However, the existing researches have been often limited to a single or to the combination of few behavioral dimensions, and they have adopted the perspective of an outside observer who is unaware of the motivations behind the specific behaviors or activities of a given individual. The key assumption of this work is that human behavior is deliberated based on an individual’s own perception of the situation that s/he is in, and that therefore it should also be studied under the same perspective. Taking inspiration from works in ubiquitous and context-aware computing, we investigate the role played by four contextual dimensions (or modalities), namely time, location, activity being carried out, and social ties, on the predictability of individuals’ behaviors, using a month of collected mobile phone sensor readings and self-reported annotations about these contextual modalities from more than two hundred study participants. Our analysis shows that any target modality (e.g. location) becomes substantially more predictable when information about the other modalities (time, activity, social ties) is made available. Multi-modality turns out to be in some sense fundamental, as some values (e.g. specific activities like “shopping”) are nearly impossible to guess correctly unless the other modalities are known. Subjectivity also has a substantial impact on predictability. A location recognition experiment suggests that subjective location annotations convey more information about activity and social ties than objective information derived from GPS measurements. We conclude the paper by analyzing how the identified contextual modalities allow to compute the diversity of personal behavior, where we show that individuals are more easily identified by rarer, rather than frequent, context annotations. These results offer support in favor of developing innovative computational models of human behaviors enriched by a characterization of the context of a given behavior.

Examining the composition of aerosols in Antarctic ice cores can provide insights into past atmospheric circulation. However, interpreting this data requires an understanding of the characteristics and variability of present-day aerosols over time. In 2019, we performed the first year-round, multiparametric optical characterisation of atmospheric aerosols at Concordia Station in East Antarctica using OPTAIR, a novel instrument based on the Single Particle Extinction and Scattering (SPES) technique. We compared this data with the chemical composition of PM10 samples collected at the site and with meteorological data. We also compared it with synchronous data from a LIDAR and a ceilometer operating at Concordia Station. Significant temporal irregularities were observed in the atmospheric aerosol load, with more than one-third of the particles being dry-deposited during brief air mass subsidence events (‘spikes’), which mainly occurred in winter. The aerosol particles detected during these events were primarily composed of sea salt. Their optical properties differ significantly depending on whether they originate from frost flowers or the open ocean. Due to the intermittent nature of aerosol advection to Antarctica and its radiative effect, we estimate that glaciological, time-integrated samples may lead to an overestimation of light extinction by a factor of 3.5 or more.

Background The advent of high-throughput experimental techniques paved the way to genome-wide computational analysis and predictive annotation studies. When considering the joint annotation of a large set of related entities, like all proteins of a certain genome, many candidate annotations could be inconsistent, or very unlikely, given the existing knowledge. A sound predictive framework capable of accounting for this type of constraints in making predictions could substantially contribute to the quality of machine-generated annotations at a genomic scale. Results We present Ocelot , a predictive pipeline which simultaneously addresses functional and interaction annotation of all proteins of a given genome. The system combines sequence-based predictors for functional and protein-protein interaction (PPI) prediction with a consistency layer enforcing (soft) constraints as fuzzy logic rules. The enforced rules represent the available prior knowledge about the classification task, including taxonomic constraints over each GO hierarchy (e.g. a protein labeled with a GO term should also be labeled with all ancestor terms) as well as rules combining interaction and function prediction. An extensive experimental evaluation on the Yeast genome shows that the integration of prior knowledge via rules substantially improves the quality of the predictions. The system largely outperforms GoFDR, the only high-ranking system at the last CAFA challenge with a readily available implementation, when GoFDR is given access to intra-genome information only (as Ocelot ), and has comparable or better results (depending on the hierarchy and performance measure) when GoFDR is allowed to use information from other genomes. Our system also compares favorably to recent methods based on deep learning.

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) is a novel IoT paradigm where sensor data, as collected by the user’s mobile devices, are integrated with user-generated content, e.g., annotations, self-reports, or images. While providing many advantages, the human involvement also brings big challenges, where the most critical is possibly the poor quality of human-provided content, most often due to the inaccurate input from non-expert users. In this paper, we propose Skeptical Learning, an interactive machine learning algorithm where the machine checks the quality of the user feedback and tries to fix it when a problem arises. In this context, the user feedback consists of answers to machine generated questions, at times defined by the machine. The main idea is to integrate three core elements, which are (i) sensor data, (ii) user answers, and (iii) existing prior knowledge of the world, and to enable a second round of validation with the user any time these three types of information jointly generate an inconsistency. The proposed solution is evaluated in a project focusing on a university student life scenario. The main goal of the project is to recognize the locations and transportation modes of the students. The results highlight an unexpectedly high pervasiveness of user mistakes in the university students life project. The results also shows the advantages provided by Skeptical Learning in dealing with the mislabeling issues in an interactive way and improving the prediction performance.

The advantages of temporal networks in capturing complex dynamics, such as diffusion and contagion, has led to breakthroughs in real world systems across numerous fields. In the case of human behavior, face-to-face interaction networks enable us to understand the dynamics of how communities emerge and evolve in time through the interactions, which is crucial in fields like epidemics, sociological studies and urban science. However, state-of-the-art datasets suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as short time-span for data collection and a small number of participants. Moreover, concerns arise for the participants’ privacy and the data collection costs. Over the past years, many successful algorithms for static networks generation have been proposed, but they often do not tackle the social structure of interactions or their temporal aspect. In this work, we extend a recent network generation approach to capture the evolution of interactions between different communities. Our method labels nodes based on their community affiliation and constructs surrogate networks that reflect the interactions of the original temporal networks between nodes with different labels. This enables the generation of synthetic networks that replicate realistic behaviors. We validate our approach by comparing structural measures between the original and generated networks across multiple face-to-face interaction datasets.