Author name cluster

Hamed Ayoobi

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5 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Argumentative Debates for Transparent Bias Detection

Hamed Ayoobi
Nico Potyka
Anna Rapberger
Francesca Toni

As the use of AI in society grows, addressing emerging biases is essential to prevent systematic discrimination. Several bias detection methods have been proposed, but, with few exceptions, these tend to ignore transparency. Instead, interpretability and explainability are core requirements for algorithmic fairness, even more so than for other algorithmic solutions, given the human-oriented nature of fairness. We present ABIDE (Argumentative BIas detection by DEbate), a novel framework that structures bias detection transparently as debate, guided by an underlying argument graph as understood in (formal and computational) argumentation. The arguments are about the success chances of groups in local neighbourhoods and the significance of these neighbourhoods. We evaluate ABIDE experimentally and demonstrate its strengths in performance against an argumentative baseline.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ProtoArgNet: Interpretable Image Classification with Super-Prototypes and Argumentation

Hamed Ayoobi
Nico Potyka
Francesca Toni

We propose ProtoArgNet, a novel interpretable deep neural architecture for image classification in the spirit of prototypical-part-learning as found, e.g., in ProtoPNet. While earlier approaches associate every class with multiple prototypical-parts, ProtoArgNet uses super-prototypes that combine prototypical-parts into a unified class representation. This is done by combining local activations of prototypes in an MLP-like manner, enabling the localization of prototypes and learning (non-linear) spatial relationships among them. By leveraging a form of argumentation, ProtoArgNet is capable of providing both supporting (i.e. `this looks like that') and attacking (i.e. `this differs from that') explanations. We demonstrate on several datasets that ProtoArgNet outperforms state-of-the-art prototypical-part-learning approaches. Moreover, the argumentation component in ProtoArgNet is customisable to the user's cognitive requirements by a process of sparsification, which leads to more compact explanations compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

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KR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Contestable AI Needs Computational Argumentation

Francesco Leofante
Hamed Ayoobi
Adam Dejl
Gabriel Freedman
Deniz Gorur
Junqi Jiang
Guilherme Paulino-Passos
Antonio Rago

AI has become pervasive in recent years, but state-of-the-art approaches predominantly neglect the need for AI systems to be contestable. Instead, contestability is advocated by AI guidelines (e. g. by the OECD) and regulation of automated decision-making (e. g. GDPR). In this position paper we explore how contestability can be achieved computationally in and for AI. We argue that contestable AI requires dynamic (human-machine and/or machine-machine) explainability and decision-making processes, whereby machines can 1. interact with humans and/or other machines to progressively explain their outputs and/or their reasoning as well as assess grounds for contestation provided by these humans and/or other machines, and 2. revise their decision-making processes to redress any issues successfully raised during contestation. Given that much of the current AI landscape is tailored to static AIs, the need to accommodate contestability will require a radical rethinking, that, we argue, computational argumentation is ideally suited to support.

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ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Explain What You See: Open-Ended Segmentation and Recognition of Occluded 3D Objects

Hamed Ayoobi
Hamidreza Kasaei 0001
Ming Cao 0001
Rineke Verbrugge
Bart Verheij

Local-HDP (Local Hierarchical Dirichlet Process) is a hierarchical Bayesian method recently used for open-ended 3D object category recognition. It has been proven to be efficient in real-time robotic applications. However, the method is not robust to a high degree of occlusion. We address this limitation in two steps. First, we propose a novel semantic 3D object-parts segmentation method that has the flexibility of Local-HDP. This method is shown to be suitable for open-ended scenarios where the number of 3D objects or object parts are not fixed and can grow over time. We show that the proposed method has a higher percentage of mean intersection over union, using a smaller number of learning instances. Second, we integrate this technique with a recently introduced argumentation-based online incremental learning method, enabling the model to handle a high degree of occlusion. We show that the resulting model produces explicit explanations for the 3D object category recognition task.

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ECAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

SpArX: Sparse Argumentative Explanations for Neural Networks

Hamed Ayoobi
Nico Potyka
Francesca Toni

Neural networks (NNs) have various applications in AI, but explaining their decisions remains challenging. Existing approaches often focus on explaining how changing individual inputs affects NNs’ outputs. However, an explanation that is consistent with the input-output behaviour of an NN is not necessarily faithful to the actual mechanics thereof. In this paper, we exploit relationships between multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and quantitative argumentation frameworks (QAFs) to create argumentative explanations for the mechanics of MLPs. Our SpArX method first sparsifies the MLP while maintaining as much of the original structure as possible. It then translates the sparse MLP into an equivalent QAF to shed light on the underlying decision process of the MLP, producing global and/or local explanations. We demonstrate experimentally that SpArX can give more faithful explanations than existing approaches, while simultaneously providing deeper insights into the actual reasoning process of MLPs.

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