awesome-explainability-literature – Research Literature Index

This repository contains a curated collection of scientific papers related to eXplainable Autonomous Robots (XAR) and eXplainability in AI (XAI). It is structured by research focus and formatted in APA style with links to official publications. BibTeX files are included for academic use.

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📚 Index

1. Experimental Proposals and Applied Work

Papers that present new XAI and XAR methods and/or evaluate them in practical scenarios.

• Halilovic, A., & Krivic, S. (2023, December). The influence of a robot’s personality on real-time explanations of its navigation. In International Conference on Social Robotics (pp. 133-147). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore. Link
• Han, Z., & Yanco, H. (2023). Communicating missing causal information to explain a robot’s past behavior. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 12(1), 1-45. Link
• Rosenthal, S., Vichivanives, P., & Carter, E. (2022). The impact of route descriptions on human expectations for robot navigation. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 11(4), 1-19. Link
• Sakai, T., Nagai, T., & Abe, K. (2023). Implementation and Evaluation of Algorithms for Realizing Explainable Autonomous Robots. IEEE Access, 11, 105299-105313. Link
• Arnold, T., Kasenberg, D., & Scheutz, M. (2021). Explaining in time: Meeting interactive standards of explanation for robotic systems. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 10(3), 1-23. Link
• Cruz, F., Dazeley, R., Vamplew, P., & Moreira, I. (2023). Explainable robotic systems: Understanding goal-driven actions in a reinforcement learning scenario. Neural Computing and Applications, 35(25), 18113-18130. Link
• Hu, S., & Nagai, T. (2023). Explainable autonomous robots in continuous state space based on graph-structured world model. Advanced Robotics, 37(16), 1025-1041. Link
• Bogatarkan, A., & Erdem, E. (2020). Explanation generation for multi-modal multi-agent path finding with optimal resource utilization using answer set programming. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 20(6), 974-989. Link
• Mualla, Y., Tchappi, I., Kampik, T., Najjar, A., Calvaresi, D., Abbas-Turki, A., ... & Nicolle, C. (2022). The quest of parsimonious XAI: A human-agent architecture for explanation formulation. Artificial intelligence, 302, 103573. Link
• Zakershahrak, M., Gong, Z., Sadassivam, N., & Zhang, Y. (2020, October). Online explanation generation for planning tasks in human-robot teaming. In 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (pp. 6304-6310). IEEE. Link
• Mota, T., & Sridharan, M. (2021, August). Answer me this: constructing disambiguation queries for explanation generation in robotics. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) (pp. 1-8). IEEE. Link
• Gong, Z., & Zhang, Y. (2018, August). Behavior explanation as intention signaling in human-robot teaming. In 2018 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 1005-1011). IEEE. Link
• Han, Z., Giger, D., Allspaw, J., Lee, M. S., Admoni, H., & Yanco, H. A. (2021). Building the foundation of robot explanation generation using behavior trees. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 10(3), 1-31. Link
• Schroeter, N., Cruz, F., & Wermter, S. (2022). Introspection-based explainable reinforcement learning in episodic and non-episodic scenarios. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.12930. Link
• Gao, X., Gong, R., Zhao, Y., Wang, S., Shu, T., & Zhu, S. C. (2020, August). Joint mind modeling for explanation generation in complex human-robot collaborative tasks. In 2020 29th IEEE international conference on robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 1119-1126). IEEE. Link
• Brandao, M., Canal, G., Krivić, S., & Magazzeni, D. (2021, May). Towards providing explanations for robot motion planning. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp. 3927-3933). IEEE. Link
• Chen, S., Boggess, K., & Feng, L. (2020, October). Towards transparent robotic planning via contrastive explanations. In 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (pp. 6593-6598). IEEE. Link
• Olivares-Alarcos, A., Foix, S., & Alenyà, G. (2021). Knowledge representation for explainability in collaborative robotics and adaptation. Link
• Brandao, M., Coles, A., & Magazzeni, D. (2021, May). Explaining path plan optimality: Fast explanation methods for navigation meshes using full and incremental inverse optimization. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (Vol. 31, pp. 56-64). Link
• Halilovic, A., & Lindner, F. (2023, March). Visuo-Textual Explanations of a Robot's Navigational Choices. In Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 531-535). Link

2. Theoretical Foundations and Literature Reviews

Includes conceptual works, taxonomies, and survey papers on interpretability, accountability and explanability.

• Anjomshoae, S., Najjar, A., Calvaresi, D., & Främling, K. (2019). Explainable agents and robots: Results from a systematic literature review. In 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2019), Montreal, Canada, May 13–17, 2019 (pp. 1078-1088). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.Link
• Wallkötter, S., Tulli, S., Castellano, G., Paiva, A., & Chetouani, M. (2021). Explainable embodied agents through social cues: a review. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 10(3), 1-24. Link
• Vilone, G., & Longo, L. (2020). Explainable artificial intelligence: a systematic review. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.00093. Link
• Rosenfeld, A., & Richardson, A. (2019). Explainability in human–agent systems. Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, 33, 673-705. Link
• Setchi, R., Dehkordi, M. B., & Khan, J. S. (2020). Explainable robotics in human-robot interactions. Procedia Computer Science, 176, 3057-3066. Link
• Yang, S. C. H., Folke, N. E. T., & Shafto, P. (2022, June). A psychological theory of explainability. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 25007-25021). PMLR. Link
• Arrieta, A. B., Díaz-Rodríguez, N., Del Ser, J., Bennetot, A., Tabik, S., Barbado, A., ... & Herrera, F. (2020). Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, taxonomies, opportunities and challenges toward responsible AI. Information fusion, 58, 82-115. Link
• Gomez, A. S. Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Review of the Literature. Link
• Sakai, T., & Nagai, T. (2022). Explainable autonomous robots: a survey and perspective. Advanced Robotics, 36(5-6), 219-238. Link

3. Regulation and Ethics

Papers discussing explainability from a legal, societal, and ethical perspective.

• Richmond, K. M., Muddamsetty, S. M., Gammeltoft-Hansen, T., Olsen, H. P., & Moeslund, T. B. (2024). Explainable AI and law: An evidential survey. Digital Society, 3(1), 1. Link

4. Our Contributions

Publications authored by our research group.

• Matellán, V., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Rico, F. M., & Ginés, J. (2021, July). The role of cybersecurity and hpc in the explainability of autonomous robots behavior. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts (ARSO) (pp. 1-5). IEEE Link
• Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., González Santamarta, M. Á., Guerrero, Á. M., Martín, F., & Matellán, V. (2021). Traceability and accountability in autonomous agents. In 13th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS 2020) 12 (pp. 295-305). Springer International Publishing Link
• Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Martín-Rico, F., Gines, J., Sierra, J. F. G., & Matellán-Olivera, V. (2020). Adapting ROS logs to facilitate transparency and accountability in service robotics. In Robot 2019: Fourth Iberian Robotics Conference: Advances in Robotics, Volume 2 (pp. 587-598). Springer International Publishing Link
• Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., Martín-Rico, F., Balsa-Comerón, J., & Matellán-Olivera, V. (2019). Accountability in mobile service robots. In Advances in Physical Agents: Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop of Physical Agents (WAF 2018), November 22-23, 2018, Madrid, Spain (pp. 242-254). Springer International Publishing Link
• González-Santamarta, M. Á., Fernández-Becerra, L., Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., González, I., & Lera, F. J. R. (2023, August). Using large language models for interpreting autonomous robots behaviors. In International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems (pp. 533-544). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland Link
• Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., González-Santamarta, M. Á., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., & Matellán-Olivera, V. (2024). Enhancing Robot Explanation Capabilities through Vision-Language Models: a Preliminary Study by Interpreting Visual Inputs for Improved Human-Robot Interaction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.09705 Link
• Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., González-Santamarta, M. A., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., & Matellán-Olivera, V. (2024). Explaining Autonomy: Enhancing Human-Robot Interaction through Explanation Generation with Large Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.04206 Link
• Fernández-Becerra, L., González-Santamarta, M. A., Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Lera, F. J. R., & Olivera, V. M. (2023, August). Accountability and Explainability in Robotics: A Proof of Concept for ROS 2-And Nav2-Based Mobile Robots. In Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems Conference (pp. 3-13). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland Link
• Fernández-Becerra, L., Manuel Guerrero-Higueras, Á., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., & Matellán, V. (2024). Accountability as a service for robotics: Performance assessment of different accountability strategies for autonomous robots. Logic Journal of the IGPL, 32(2), 243-262 Link
• Fernández-Becerra, L., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., & Fernández-Llamas, C. (2022). Analysis of the performance of different accountability strategies for autonomous robots. In 14th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems and 12th International Conference on European Transnational Educational (CISIS 2021 and ICEUTE 2021) 14 (pp. 41-51). Springer International Publishing Link
• Rodríguez‐Lera, F. J., González‐Santamarta, M. Á., Guerrero‐Higueras, Á. M., Martín‐Rico, F., & Matellán‐Olivera, V. (2022). Towards explainability in robotics: A performance analysis of a cloud accountability system. Expert Systems, 39(9), e13004 Link
• Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., González-Santamarta, M. A., González-Cantón, A., Fernández-Becerra, L., Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., & Guerrero-Higueras, A. M. (2024). ROXIE: Defining a Robotic eXplanation and Interpretability Engine. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.16606 Link
• Sobrín Hidalgo, D., González Fernández, I., González Santamarta, M. Á., Campazas Vega, A., Guerrero Higueras, Á. M., Rodríguez Lera, F. J., & Matellán, V. (2024, May). Explicabilidad aplicada a ciberseguridad en sistemas autónomos: Un enfoque basado en LLMs para la detección forense de amenazas. In IX Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad (JNIC 2024), Sevilla, Spain. Link
• González-Cantón, A., González-Santamarta, M. A., Soriano, E., Guardiola, G., & Rodriguez Lera, F. J. (2024, October). Performance Impact of Strengthening the Accountability and Explainability System in Autonomous Robots. In International Conference on EUropean Transnational Education (pp. 77-87). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland Link
• Fernández-Becerra, L., González-Santamarta, M. Á., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., & Olivera, V. M. (2024). Enhancing Trust in Autonomous Agents: An Architecture for Accountability and Explainability through Blockchain and Large Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.09567 Link
• Inyesto-Alonso, L., Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., Álvarez-Aparicio, C., Campazas-Vega, A., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., & Matellán Olivera, V. (2024). Defining a Standard Blockchain-based Black Box for Autonomous Systems Link
• D. Sobrín-Hidalgo, Á. Manuel Guerrero-Higueras and V. Matellán-Olivera, "Generating Explanations for Autonomous Robots: A Systematic Review," in IEEE Access, vol. 13, pp. 20413-20426, 2025, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3535097. Link
• Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., González-Fernández, I., González-Santamarta, M. Á., Campazas-Vega, A., Álvarez-Aparicio, C., Guerrero-Higueras, Á. M., ... & Matellán-Olivera, V. (2024, October). An Approach Based on LLMs for Forensic Threat Detection in Autonomous Systems. In International Conference on EUropean Transnational Education (pp. 25-34). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland Link

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📂 BibTeX Files

All references are also available as .bib files:

• experimental_work.bib – Experimental proposals and empirical work
• theoretical_work.bib – Theoretical papers and literature surveys
• regulation.bib – Regulation and ethics
• our_work.bib – Our group’s contributions

Located in the bibtex/ folder.

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💡 About

This repository is maintained by the Robotic Group of the University of León, aiming to centralize and share high-quality scientific resources on explainable AI (XAI).

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🤝 Contributions

We welcome additions! Please follow the existing APA citation style and include a link to the official publication page. Submit a pull request or open an issue.

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📄 License

MIT License