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Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) represents an active discipline dedicated to clarifying the internal mechanisms of AI systems, thereby fostering stakeholder confidence and advancing the deployment of accountable technology. A primary theoretical hurdle within XAI involves engineering techniques capable of producing clear, accessible interpretations without sacrificing scalability or operational performance in intricate domains. While rule-based methodologies offer a framework for decoding AI-driven conclusions, they are prone to becoming overly complex in dense environments, which diminishes both their comprehensibility and computational scalability. Furthermore, these approaches frequently overlook contrastive logic, which leaves observers unable to discern why a specific outcome was prioritized over alternatives. To resolve this underlying scientific problem, this research investigates the fusion of computational argumentation—a specialized domain of AI that replicates cognitive processes through defeasible reasoning—with rule-based XAI architectures. Computational argumentation provides a mechanism whereby arguments derived from structured rules can be invalidated or withdrawn when confronted with conflicting evidence. Consequently, this framework offers a compelling avenue for refining rule-based systems to yield more transparent AI models. Despite the synergistic benefits of combining rule-based structures with computational argumentation, academic inquiry into their synthesis remains sparse. Accordingly, this paper also targets the practical engineering challenge of realizing this conceptual integration within functional AI software. This investigation utilizes the Logic Learning Machine (LLM)—a specialized rule-extraction methodology—and introduces a modular framework designed to map input rules directly into a structured argumentation network via state-of-the-art argumentation techniques. Empirical evaluations performed on various binary classification problems from the UCI Machine Learning Repository validate the utility of this combined model. The LLM strategy proved highly proficient at extracting a compact, interpretable collection of if-then rules characterized by minimal antecedent premises, all while sustaining strong predictive accuracy across all evaluated datasets. Concurrently, the argumentation-based models delivered classification performance comparable to the native if-then rule configurations, achieving this through a streamlined rule set while offering vastly superior explainability. Ultimately, this work delivers an innovative framework for the automated and streamlined generation of arguments and their internal conflicts directly from raw data, simultaneously addressing fundamental theoretical and practical barriers to propagate argumentation frameworks within the XAI landscape.

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) exhibits significant potential for refining intricate control and decision-making systems, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) suffers from a distinct lack of explainability. This limitation restricts its deployment within highly regulated domains, including manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. The opacity of DRL decision-making introduces structural challenges that impede operational efficiency and resource management—an issue that intensifies alongside ongoing algorithmic advancements. While current trends favor transitioning from traditional Experience Replay configurations to A3C architectures, the latter imposes substantially greater resource demands. Furthermore, despite continuous efforts to refine selection mechanisms within Experience Replay, repository capacities generally remain elevated. In this study, we evaluate a Deep Convolutional Q-learning agent across 20 Atari environments while deliberately downsizing the Experience Replay capacity from 1×106 to 5×102. Our findings indicate that lowering the capacity from 1×104 to 5×103 does not meaningfully degrade performance rewards, thereby establishing a viable strategy for resource-efficient DRL frameworks. To clarify agent choices and correlate them with inherent game mechanics, we introduce a novel methodology: visualizing the Experience Replay mechanism utilizing the Deep SHAP Explainer. This framework enhances domain comprehension and delivers transparent, interpretable accounts, though capacity constraints must be managed carefully to mitigate overfitting. Ultimately, this research validates the practicality of minimizing Experience Replay storage and supports the integration of transparent explanations via the Deep SHAP Explainer to advance resource conservation.

Machine learning (ML) techniques have been applied in diverse manners to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Predictive ML models have been constructed, for example, for both diagnostic and prognostic objectives, utilizing varying data modalities such as textual, visual, and structured formats. Because of the distinct characteristics of this disease and its temporal transformation, a comprehensive understanding of the central elements driving the clinical trajectory of COVID-19 in individual patients remains incomplete. Throughout all phases of this study, a medical specialist was actively engaged via a human-in-the-loop framework. This collaborative element represents a vital yet frequently overlooked component of the ML and knowledge extraction (KE) workflow. Our findings indicate that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can offer substantial reinforcement to this dimension of ML and KE. This investigation centered on employing ML for knowledge extraction across two distinct operational scenarios. In the initial scenario, we sought to determine if integrating data regarding the dominant COVID-19 variant affects the predictive performance of the ML models. In the subsequent scenario, we concentrated on prognostic classification models designed to predict a patient's requirement for intensive care unit admission, integrating various XAI methodologies. We implemented nine distinct ML techniques, specifically XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, logistic regression, Naive Bayes, random forest, SGD, SVM-linear, and SVM-RBF. The predictive quality of these models was evaluated using precision, accuracy, and AUC metrics. Following this evaluation, knowledge extraction was performed on the highest-performing models through two discrete pathways: (a) automated feature extraction using forward stepwise selection (FSS); and (b) the identification of attributes and their interactions using model explainability tools. Both sets of features were evaluated against a baseline configuration of attributes selected a priori by medical professionals using domain expertise. Our empirical tests demonstrated that incorporating data on the prevailing COVID-19 variant did not alter the performance of the generated ML models. Furthermore, the results indicated that human medical experts displayed significantly higher precision in identifying meaningful attributes compared to the automated FSS approach. Explainability tools identified nearly identical sets of attributes as the medical expert, while additionally uncovering noteworthy attribute interactions that the specialist subsequently evaluated from a clinical perspective. The outcomes of this investigation and their broader implications are examined.