Two Papers Accepted at the XAI 2026 Conference

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to share that two papers from HERCOLE Lab have been accepted at the 4th World Conference on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence. This is a great recognition of our lab’s ongoing efforts to advance transparency, trust, and human-centered AI.

1. PONTE: Personalized Orchestration for Natural Language Trustworthy Explanations

Authors: Vittoria Vineis, Matteo Silvestri, Lorenzo Antonelli, Filippo Betello, and Gabriele Tolomei

This work introduces PONTE, a human-in-the-loop framework for generating personalized and trustworthy natural-language explanations for AI systems. Instead of relying on static prompts, PONTE models personalization as a closed-loop process, combining preference-aware generation with verification modules that enforce faithfulness, completeness, and stylistic alignment. Experiments and human evaluations show that this verification-refinement loop significantly improves the quality and reliability of AI-generated explanations across domains such as healthcare and finance.

Pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06485

2. Demystifying Sequential Recommendations: Counterfactual Explanations via Genetic Algorithms

Authors: Filippo Betello, Domiziano Scarcelli, Giuseppe Perelli, Fabrizio Silvestri, and Gabriele Tolomei

This paper proposes the first counterfactual explanation framework for Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs). By leveraging a specialized genetic algorithm for discrete sequences, the method answers the question: “What minimal changes in a user’s interaction history would lead to different recommendations?” The work also shows that generating such explanations is NP-Complete, and demonstrates through extensive experiments that meaningful counterfactual explanations can be generated while preserving model fidelity.

Pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03606

Congratulations to all the authors for this excellent work and contribution to the field of Explainable AI.

XAI2026 | HERCOLE Lab

Two Papers Accepted at the XAI 2026 Conference

1. PONTE: Personalized Orchestration for Natural Language Trustworthy Explanations

2. Demystifying Sequential Recommendations: Counterfactual Explanations via Genetic Algorithms