Towards the next generation explainable AI that promotes AI-human mutual understanding

Recent advances in deep learning AI has demanded better explanations on AI’s operations to enhance transparency of AI’s decisions, especially in critical systems such as self-driving car or medical diagnosis applications, to ensure safety, user trust and user satisfaction. However, current Explainable AI (XAI) solutions focus on using more AI to explain AI, without considering users’ mental processes. Here we use cognitive science theories and methodologies to develop a next-generation XAI framework that promotes human-AI mutual understanding, using computer vision AI models as examples due to its importance in critical systems. Specifically, we propose to equip XAI with an important cognitive capacity in human social interaction: theory of mind (ToM), i.e., the capacity to understand others’ behaviour by attributing mental states to them. We focus on two ToM abilities: (1) Inferring human strategy and performance (i.e., Machine’s ToM), and (2) Inferring human understanding of AI strategy and trust towards AI (i.e., to infer Human’s ToM). Computational modeling of human cognition and experimental psychology methods play an important role for XAI to develop these two ToM abilities to provide user-centered explanations through comparing users' strategy with AI’s strategy and estimating user’s current understanding of AI’s strategy, similar to real-life teachers. Enhanced human-AI mutual understanding can in turn lead to better adoption and trust of AI systems. This framework thus highlights the importance of cognitive science approaches to XAI.