XAI for Communication Networks

Explainable AI (XAI) is a topic of intense activity in the research community today. However, for AI models deployed in the critical infrastructure of communications networks, explainability alone is not enough to earn the trust of network operations teams comprising human experts with many decades of collective experience. In the present work we discuss some use cases in communications networks and state some of the additional properties, including accountability, that XAI models would have to satisfy before they can be widely deployed. In particular, we advocate for a human-in-the-Ioop approach to train and validate XAI models. Additionally, we discuss the use cases of XAI models around improving data preprocessing and data augmentation techniques, and refining data labeling rules for producing consistently labeled network datasets.