Towards multi-modal causability with Graph Neural Networks enabling information fusion for explainable AI

AI is remarkably successful and outperforms human experts in certain tasks, even in complex domains such as medicine. Humans on the other hand are experts at multi-modal thinking and can embed new inputs almost instantly into a conceptual knowledge space shaped by experience. In many fields the aim is to build systems capable of explaining themselves, engaging in interactive what-if questions. Such questions, called counterfactuals, are becoming important in the rising field of explainable AI (xAI). Our central hypothesis is that using conceptual knowledge as a guiding model of reality will help to train more explainable, more robust and less biased machine learning models, ideally able to learn from fewer data. One important aspect in the medical domain is that various modalities contribute to one single result. Our main question is “How can we construct a multi-modal feature representation space (spanning images, text, genomics data) using knowledge bases as an initial connector for the development of novel explanation interface techniques?”. In this paper we argue for using Graph Neural Networks as a method-of-choice, enabling information fusion for multi-modal causability (causability – not to confuse with causality – is the measurable extent to which an explanation to a human expert achieves a specified level of causal understanding). The aim of this paper is to motivate the international xAI community to further work into the fields of multi-modal embeddings and interactive explainability, to lay the foundations for effective future human–AI interfaces. We emphasize that Graph Neural Networks play a major role for multi-modal causability, since causal links between features can be defined directly using graph structures.