Automated processing of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence outputs in deep learning models for fault diagnostics of large infrastructures
Giovanni Floreale, Piero Baraldi, Enrico Zio, Olga Fink · Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence · 2025
Deep Learning (DL) models processing images to recognize the health state of large infrastructure components can exhibit biases and rely on non-causal shortcuts. eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) can address these issues but manually analyzing explanations generated by XAI techniques is time-consuming and prone to errors. This work proposes a novel framework that combines post-hoc explanations with semi-supervised learning to automatically identify anomalous explanations that deviate from those of correctly classified images and may therefore indicate model abnormal behaviors. This significantly reduces the workload for maintenance decision-makers, who only need to manually reclassify images flagged as having anomalous explanations. The proposed framework is applied to drone-collected images of insulator shells for power grid infrastructure monitoring, considering two different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), GradCAM explanations and Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection. The average classification accuracy on two faulty classes is improved by 8 % and maintenance operators are required to manually reclassify only 15 % of the images. We compare the proposed framework with a state-of-the-art approach based on the faithfulness metric: the experimental results obtained demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently achieves F 1 scores larger than those of the faithfulness-based approach. Additionally, the proposed framework successfully identifies correct classifications that result from non-causal shortcuts, such as the presence of ID tags printed on insulator shells. • Imaging and Deep Learning (DL) for large infrastructure fault diagnostics has emerged. • eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) outputs enhance DL models trustworthiness. • Processing XAI output by experts is time consuming and error prone. • We develop a methodology to automatically process XAI outputs. • It identifies misclassifications and shortcuts in classifications of insulator images.