Concept drift is the phenomenon in which the underlying data distributions and statistical properties of a target domain change over time, leading to a degradation in model performance. Consequently, production models require continuous drift detection monitoring. Most drift detection methods to date are supervised, relying on ground-truth labels. However, they are inapplicable in many real-world scenarios, as true labels are often unavailable. Although recent efforts have proposed unsupervised drift detectors, many lack the accuracy required for reliable detection or are too computationally intensive for real-time use in high-dimensional, large-scale production environments. Moreover, they often fail to characterize or explain drift effectively. To address these limitations, we propose DriftLens, an unsupervised framework for real-time concept drift detection and characterization. Designed for deep learning classifiers handling unstructured data, DriftLens leverages distribution distances in deep learning representations to enable efficient and accurate detection. Additionally, it characterizes drift by analyzing and explaining its impact on each label. Our evaluation across classifiers and data-types demonstrates that DriftLens (i) outperforms previous methods in detecting drift in 15/17 use cases; (ii) runs at least 5 times faster; (iii) produces drift curves that align closely with actual drift (correlation $\geq \!0.85$); (iv) effectively identifies representative drift samples as explanations.

Wildfires are one of the natural hazards that the European Union is actively monitoring through the Copernicus EMS Earth observation program which continuously releases public information related to such catastrophic events. Such occurrences are the cause of both short- and long-term damages. Thus, to limit their impact and plan the restoration process, a rapid intervention by authorities is needed, which can be enhanced by the use of satellite imagery and automatic burned area delineation methodologies, accelerating the response and the decision-making processes. In this context, we analyze the burned area severity estimation problem by exploiting a state-of-the-art deep learning framework. Experimental results compare different model architectures and loss functions on a very large real-world Sentinel2 satellite dataset. Furthermore, a novel multi-channel attention-based analysis is presented to uncover the prediction behaviour and provide model interpretability. A perturbation mechanism is applied to an attention-based DS-UNet to evaluate the contribution of different domain-driven groups of channels to the severity estimation problem.

Despite the high accuracy offered by state-of-the-art deep natural-language models (e.g., LSTM, BERT), their application in real-life settings is still widely limited, as they behave like a black-box to the end-user. Hence, explainability is rapidly becoming a fundamental requirement of future-generation data-driven systems based on deep-learning approaches. Several attempts to fulfill the existing gap between accuracy and interpretability have been made. However, robust and specialized eXplainable Artificial Intelligence solutions, tailored to deep natural-language models, are still missing. We propose a new framework, named T-EBAnO, which provides innovative prediction-local and class-based model-global explanation strategies tailored to deep learning natural-language models. Given a deep NLP model and the textual input data, T-EBAnO provides an objective, human-readable, domain-specific assessment of the reasons behind the automatic decision-making process. Specifically, the framework extracts sets of interpretable features mining the inner knowledge of the model. Then, it quantifies the influence of each feature during the prediction process by exploiting the normalized Perturbation Influence Relation index at the local level and the novel Global Absolute Influence and Global Relative Influence indexes at the global level. The effectiveness and the quality of the local and global explanations obtained with T-EBAnO are proved on an extensive set of experiments addressing different tasks, such as a sentiment-analysis task performed by a fine-tuned BERT model and a toxic-comment classification task performed by an LSTM model. The quality of the explanations proposed by T-EBAnO, and, specifically, the correlation between the influence index and human judgment, has been evaluated by humans in a survey with more than 4000 judgments. To prove the generality of T-EBAnO and its model/task-independent methodology, experiments with other models (ALBERT, ULMFit) on popular public datasets (Ag News and Cola) are also discussed in detail.

AI regulations are expected to prohibit machine learning models from using sensitive attributes during training. However, the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) classifiers, which rely on deep learning, operate as black-box systems, complicating the detection and remediation of such misuse. Traditional bias mitigation methods in NLP aim for comparable performance across different groups based on attributes like gender or race but fail to address the underlying issue of reliance on protected attributes. To partly fix that, we introduce NLPGuard, a framework for mitigating the reliance on protected attributes in NLP classifiers. NLPGuard takes an unlabeled dataset, an existing NLP classifier, and its training data as input, producing a modified training dataset that significantly reduces dependence on protected attributes without compromising accuracy. NLPGuard is applied to three classification tasks: identifying toxic language, sentiment analysis, and occupation classification. Our evaluation shows that current NLP classifiers heavily depend on protected attributes, with up to 23% of the most predictive words associated with these attributes. However, NLPGuard effectively reduces this reliance by up to 79%, while slightly improving accuracy.

In the era of “connected vehicles,” i.e., vehicles that generate long data streams during their usage through the telematics on-board device, data-driven methodologies assume a crucial role in creating valuable insights to support the decision-making process effectively. Predictive analytics allows anticipation of vehicle issues and optimized maintenance, reducing the resulting costs. In this paper, we focus on analyzing data collected from heavy trucks during their use, a relevant task for companies due to the high commercial value of the monitored vehicle. The proposed methodology, named TETRAPAC, offers a generalizable approach to estimate vehicle health conditions based on monitored features enriched by innovative key performance indicators. We discussed performance of TETRAPAC in two real-life settings related to trucks. The obtained results in both tasks are promising and able to support the company’s decision-making process in the planning of maintenance interventions.

The accuracy and flexibility of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have been highly validated over the past years. However, their intrinsic opaqueness is still affecting their reliability and limiting their application in critical production systems, where the black-box behavior is difficult to be accepted. This work proposes EBAnO, an innovative explanation framework able to analyze the decision-making process of DCNNs in image classification by providing prediction-local and class-based model-wise explanations through the unsupervised mining of knowledge contained in multiple convolutional layers. EBAnO provides detailed visual and numerical explanations thanks to two specific indexes that measure the features’ influence and their influence precision in the decision-making process. The framework has been experimentally evaluated, both quantitatively and qualitatively, by (i) analyzing its explanations with four state-of-the-art DCNN architectures, (ii) comparing its results with three state-of-the-art explanation strategies and (iii) assessing its effectiveness and easiness of understanding through human judgment, by means of an online survey. EBAnO has been released as open-source code and it is freely available online.