A new paradigm for artificial intelligence based on group equivariant non-expansive operators

Abstract

The recent frantic surge of machine learning and, more broadly, of artificial intelligence (AI) brings to light old and new open issues, and among them, the so-called eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) – AI that humans can understand – as opposed to black-box learning systems where even their designers cannot explain AI decisions. One of the major XAI questions is how to design transparent learning systems that incorporate prior knowledge. These topics are becoming more relevant and pervasive as AI systems become more unfathomable and entangled with human factors. Recently a new paradigm for XAI has been introduced in literature, based on group equivariant non-expansive operators (GENEOs), which are able to inject prior knowledge in a learning system. Hence, the use of GENEOs dramatically reduces the number of unknown parameters to be identified and the size of the related training set, providing both computational advantages and an increased degree of interpretability of the results. Here we will illustrate the main characteristics of GENEOs and the encouraging results already obtained on a couple of industrial case studies.