CORTEXA
← Browse
arxivcs.LG2026-07-01

Explainable AI for Cancer Drug Response Prediction: Beyond Univariate Feature Attributions

Martino Ciaperoni, Margherita Lalli, Simone Piaggesi, Martina Varisco, Francesco Carli, Riccardo Guidotti, Dino Pedreschi, Francesco Raimondi, Fosca Giannotti

Predicting cancer drug response from transcriptomic profiles is a cornerstone of precision oncology, yet the scientific value of machine learning models hinges not solely on predictive accuracy, but also on their capacity to generate reliable biological insights. Current explainability approaches in this setting are computationally costly, lack robustness, and reduce complex drug response to univariate gene importance scores, overlooking the coordinated gene activity that drives sensitivity and resistance. In this work, we present ILLUME+, a scalable post-hoc explainability framework that moves beyond single-gene assessments to capture multiple, complementary forms of explanation. Integrated into our end-to-end pipeline, ILLUME+ produces more stable gene importance scores than existing baselines, recovers established drug-gene associations and mechanisms of action, and enables AI-assisted hypothesis generation to uncover novel interaction-driven molecular signals in cancer biology.

View free PDFSource page

Related papers

arxivcond-mat.mtrl-scics.AIcs.LG2026-07-22

Generative and multimodal AI for materials prediction and design: Progress, challenges, and perspectives

Xianyuan Liu, Charles Anjah, Benjamin E. Jolly, Jonathon F. S. Markanday, Joshua Berry, Haolin Wang, et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating materials prediction and design by enabling efficient exploration of chemical and structural spaces, with particular promise for novel materials discovery. However, novelty in materials discovery encompasses chemical plausibility, stru…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.LG2026-07-24

Dysphagia Risk Stratification in Head and Neck Cancer via Two-Stage PRO-Clinical Stacking

Siyuan Zhao, Eric Ababio Anyimadu, Zachary G. Brumm, Yue Ma, Clifton David Fuller, Xinhua Zhang, et al.

Dysphagia is a debilitating late effect of head and neck cancer (HNC) treatment, yet timely identification of at-risk patients remains challenging in survivorship care. Definitive assessment relies on videofluoroscopic imaging, as captured by the Dynamic Imaging Grade of Swallowi…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.AIcs.CLcs.ETcs.LGcs.MA2026-07-23

The Boundaries of Automation: A Theory of Persistent Human Participation

Fares Fourati, Hinrich Schütze, Eyke Hüllermeier, Iryna Gurevych

The rapid progress of AI has intensified the long-standing pursuit of automation: replacing human participation with algorithms wherever possible. Implicit in this pursuit is the assumption that humans remain in the loop only because current AI systems are not yet sufficiently ca…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.HCcs.AIcs.LGcs.MM2026-07-24

Unboxing Diffusion Models for the Arts: Interactive Model Bending and Practice-Based Explainability

Ahmed M. Abuzuraiq, Philippe Pasquier

Explainable AI (XAI) in creative practice can be less about technocentric explanation and more about enabling artists to inspect modify and debug models as part of making Yet largescale texttoimage diffusion systems are typically presented as opaque endtoend tools limiting this k…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.LG2026-07-23

A Polynomial Architecture-Attribution Co-Design Framework for Exact Aumann-Shapley Attribution in GNNs

Bizu Feng, Zhimu Yang, Shuming Wang, Shaode Yu, Yuan Cheng, Xiaojun Qian, et al.

We study feature-level and node-level explanations for graph neural networks (GNNs) through the lens of Aumann-Shapley attribution. Path-integral methods such as Integrated Gradients provide an axiomatic formulation of attribution, but their practical use in deep GNNs typically r…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.LGcs.IR2026-07-22

Cardinality-Decomposed Loss: Matching Training Objectives to Relation Structure in Heterogeneous Recommendation Graphs

Parul Maheshwari, Amulya Paruchuri, Yiqing Zou, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Farhad Farahani, Prakhar Mehrotra

Graph Neural Networks trained on heterogenous bipartite graphs form a common basis in recommendation systems. These graphs often express relations that vary in cardinality, for example, user-item preferences are one-to-many and user-attribute features are one-to-one. Traditionall…

View free PDFSource page