Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2505.02828

Privacy Risks and Preservation Methods in Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Scoping Review

Sonal Allana·Mohan Kankanhalli·Rozita Dara
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a pillar of Trustworthy AI and aims to bring transparency in complex models that are opaque by nature. Despite the benefits of incorporating explanations in models, an urgent need is found in addressing the privacy concerns of providing this additional information to end users. In this article, we conduct a scoping review of existing literature to elicit details on the conflict between privacy and explainability. Using the standard methodology for scoping review, we extracted 57 articles from 1,943 studies published from January 2019 to December 2024. The review addresses 3 research questions to present readers with more understanding of the topic: (1) what are the privacy risks of releasing explanations in AI systems? (2) what current methods have researchers employed to achieve privacy preservation in XAI systems? (3) what constitutes a privacy preserving explanation? Based on the knowledge synthesized from the selected studies, we categorize the privacy risks and preservation methods in XAI and propose the characteristics of privacy preserving explanations to aid researchers and practitioners in understanding the requirements of XAI that is privacy compliant. Lastly, we identify the challenges in balancing privacy with other system desiderata and provide recommendations for achieving privacy preserving XAI. We expect that this review will shed light on the complex relationship of privacy and explainability, both being the fundamental principles of Trustworthy AI.

Explore related subjects

cs.AIcs.CR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Sonal Allana, Mohan Kankanhalli, Rozita Dara. 2025-12-02. Privacy Risks and Preservation Methods in Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Scoping Review. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02828

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

InterPol: De-anonymizing LM Arena via Interpolated Preference Learning

Strict anonymity of model responses is a key for the reliability of voting-based leaderboards, such as LM Arena. While prior studies have attempted to compromise this assumption using simple statistical features like TF-IDF or bag-ofwords, these methods often lack the discriminative power to distinguish between stylistically similar or within-family models. To overcome these limitations and expose the severity of vulnerability, we introduce INTERPOL, a model-driven identification framework that learns to distinguish target models from others using interpolated preference data. Specifically, INTERPOL captures deep stylistic patterns that superficial statistical features miss by synthesizing hard negative samples through model interpolation and employing an adaptive curriculum learning strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that INTERPOL significantly outperforms existing baselines in identification accuracy. Furthermore, we quantify the real-world threat of our findings through ranking manipulation simulations on Arena battle data.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Preregistered Belief Revision Contracts

Deliberative multi-agent systems allow agents to exchange messages and revise beliefs over time. While this interaction is meant to improve performance, it can also create dangerous conformity effects: agreement, confidence, prestige, or majority size may be treated as if they were evidence, producing high-confidence convergence to false conclusions. To address this, we introduce PBRC (Preregistered Belief Revision Contracts), a protocol-level mechanism that strictly separates open communication from admissible epistemic change. A PBRC contract publicly fixes first-order evidence triggers, admissible revision operators, a priority rule, and a fallback policy. A non-fallback step is accepted only when it cites a preregistered trigger and provides a nonempty witness set of externally validated evidence tokens. This ensures that every substantive belief change is both enforceable by a router and auditable after the fact. In this paper, (a) we prove that under evidential contracts with conservative fallback, social-only rounds cannot increase confidence and cannot generate purely conformity-driven wrong-but-sure cascades. (b) We show that auditable trigger protocols admit evidential PBRC normal forms that preserve belief trajectories and canonicalized audit traces. (c) We demonstrate that sound enforcement yields epistemic accountability: any change of top hypothesis is attributable to a concrete validated witness set. For token-invariant contracts, (d) we prove that enforced trajectories depend only on token-exposure traces; under flooding dissemination, these traces are characterized exactly by truncated reachability, giving tight diameter bounds for universal evidence closure. Finally, we introduce a companion contractual dynamic doxastic logic to specify trace invariants, and provide simulations illustrating cascade suppression, auditability, and robustness-liveness trade-offs.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Anon: Extrapolating Adaptivity Beyond SGD and Adam

Adaptive optimizers such as Adam and non-adaptive methods like SGD exhibit distinct generalization capabilities across different architectures. Prior tunable optimizers attempt to bridge this gap by strictly interpolating between SGD and Adam, effectively confining adaptivity within the 0-to-1 bound. However, this restricted interpolation is fundamentally insufficient: we reveal that optimal adaptivity often requires extrapolation, such as negative adaptivity for classical CNNs and adaptivity of at least one ($γ\geq 1$) for Transformers. Extrapolating adaptivity theoretically violates the strict non-decreasing pre-conditioner assumption, often leading to divergence in existing methods. To break this barrier, we propose Anon, an optimizer that achieves fully continuous adaptivity extrapolation across the entire real-number spectrum. To guarantee provable stability in these out-of-bound regimes, we introduce Incremental Delay Update (IDU), a novel mechanism that bypasses hard max-tracking strategies. We theoretically establish Anon's convergence in both convex and non-convex settings. Empirically, by exploring previously unreachable adaptivity landscapes, Anon demonstrates highly competitive and scalable performance among state-of-the-art element-wise optimizers on representative image classification, diffusion, and large language modeling tasks.

cs.AI↗