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Christin Seifert

Christin Seifert contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Shortcut Mitigation via Spurious-Positive Samples

Shortcut mitigation strategies commonly rely on training data annotations, group-balanced held-out data or the presence of all groups, i.e., all combinations of (spurious) attributes and classes, in the training data. However, these requirements are rarely met in practice. We instead propose a method for targeted model analysis to identify a small set of instances in which the model relies on spurious attributes. Using that set and following ``this feature should not be used for prediction'' reasoning, we identify highly relevant neurons in an intermediate layer and regularize their impact. This ensures that models learn to depend on informative features rather than being right for the wrong reasons, thereby improving robustness without requiring additional balanced held-out data or annotations.

preprint2025arXiv

Explanation format does not matter; but explanations do -- An Eggsbert study on explaining Bayesian Optimisation tasks

Bayesian Optimisation (BO) is a family of methods for finding optimal parameters when the underlying function to be optimised is unknown. BO is used, for example, for hyperparameter tuning in machine learning and as an expert support tool for tuning cyberphysical systems. For settings where humans are involved in the tuning task, methods have been developed to explain BO (Explainable Bayesian Optimization, XBO). However, there is little guidance on how to present XBO results to humans so that they can tune the system effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we investigate how the XBO explanation format affects users' task performance, task load, understanding and trust in XBO. We chose a task that is accessible to a wide range of users. Specifically, we set up an egg cooking scenario with 6 parameters that participants had to adjust to achieve a perfect soft-boiled egg. We compared three different explanation formats: a bar chart, a list of rules and a textual explanation in a between-subjects online study with 213 participants. Our results show that adding any type of explanation increases task success, reduces the number of trials needed to achieve success, and improves comprehension and confidence. While explanations add more information for participants to process, we found no increase in user task load. We also found that the aforementioned results were independent of the explanation format; all formats had a similar effect. This is an interesting finding for practical applications, as it suggests that explanations can be added to BO tuning tasks without the burden of designing or selecting specific explanation formats. In the future, it would be interesting to investigate scenarios of prolonged use of the explanation formats and whether they have different effects on users' mental models of the underlying system.

preprint2022arXiv

Survey on Automated Short Answer Grading with Deep Learning: from Word Embeddings to Transformers

Automated short answer grading (ASAG) has gained attention in education as a means to scale educational tasks to the growing number of students. Recent progress in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning has largely influenced the field of ASAG, of which we survey the recent research advancements. We complement previous surveys by providing a comprehensive analysis of recently published methods that deploy deep learning approaches. In particular, we focus our analysis on the transition from hand engineered features to representation learning approaches, which learn representative features for the task at hand automatically from large corpora of data. We structure our analysis of deep learning methods along three categories: word embeddings, sequential models, and attention-based methods. Deep learning impacted ASAG differently than other fields of NLP, as we noticed that the learned representations alone do not contribute to achieve the best results, but they rather show to work in a complementary way with hand-engineered features. The best performance are indeed achieved by methods that combine the carefully hand-engineered features with the power of the semantic descriptions provided by the latest models, like transformers architectures. We identify challenges and provide an outlook on research direction that can be addressed in the future

preprint2022arXiv

Towards a trustworthy, secure and reliable enclave for machine learning in a hospital setting: The Essen Medical Computing Platform (EMCP)

AI/Computing at scale is a difficult problem, especially in a health care setting. We outline the requirements, planning and implementation choices as well as the guiding principles that led to the implementation of our secure research computing enclave, the Essen Medical Computing Platform (EMCP), affiliated with a major German hospital. Compliance, data privacy and usability were the immutable requirements of the system. We will discuss the features of our computing enclave and we will provide our recipe for groups wishing to adopt a similar setup.

preprint2021arXiv

This Looks Like That, Because ... Explaining Prototypes for Interpretable Image Recognition

Image recognition with prototypes is considered an interpretable alternative for black box deep learning models. Classification depends on the extent to which a test image "looks like" a prototype. However, perceptual similarity for humans can be different from the similarity learned by the classification model. Hence, only visualising prototypes can be insufficient for a user to understand what a prototype exactly represents, and why the model considers a prototype and an image to be similar. We address this ambiguity and argue that prototypes should be explained. We improve interpretability by automatically enhancing visual prototypes with textual quantitative information about visual characteristics deemed important by the classification model. Specifically, our method clarifies the meaning of a prototype by quantifying the influence of colour hue, shape, texture, contrast and saturation and can generate both global and local explanations. Because of the generality of our approach, it can improve the interpretability of any similarity-based method for prototypical image recognition. In our experiments, we apply our method to the existing Prototypical Part Network (ProtoPNet). Our analysis confirms that the global explanations are generalisable, and often correspond to the visually perceptible properties of a prototype. Our explanations are especially relevant for prototypes which might have been interpreted incorrectly otherwise. By explaining such 'misleading' prototypes, we improve the interpretability and simulatability of a prototype-based classification model. We also use our method to check whether visually similar prototypes have similar explanations, and are able to discover redundancy. Code is available at https://github.com/M-Nauta/Explaining_Prototypes .

preprint2020arXiv

Automated Retrieval of ATT&CK Tactics and Techniques for Cyber Threat Reports

Over the last years, threat intelligence sharing has steadily grown, leading cybersecurity professionals to access increasingly larger amounts of heterogeneous data. Among those, cyber attacks' Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) have proven to be particularly valuable to characterize threat actors' behaviors and, thus, improve defensive countermeasures. Unfortunately, this information is often hidden within human-readable textual reports and must be extracted manually. In this paper, we evaluate several classification approaches to automatically retrieve TTPs from unstructured text. To implement these approaches, we take advantage of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, an open knowledge base of adversarial tactics and techniques, to train classifiers and label results. Finally, we present rcATT, a tool built on top of our findings and freely distributed to the security community to support cyber threat report automated analysis.

preprint2020arXiv

Comparing Rule-based, Feature-based and Deep Neural Methods for De-identification of Dutch Medical Records

Unstructured information in electronic health records provide an invaluable resource for medical research. To protect the confidentiality of patients and to conform to privacy regulations, de-identification methods automatically remove personally identifying information from these medical records. However, due to the unavailability of labeled data, most existing research is constrained to English medical text and little is known about the generalizability of de-identification methods across languages and domains. In this study, we construct a varied dataset consisting of the medical records of 1260 patients by sampling data from 9 institutes and three domains of Dutch healthcare. We test the generalizability of three de-identification methods across languages and domains. Our experiments show that an existing rule-based method specifically developed for the Dutch language fails to generalize to this new data. Furthermore, a state-of-the-art neural architecture performs strongly across languages and domains, even with limited training data. Compared to feature-based and rule-based methods the neural method requires significantly less configuration effort and domain-knowledge. We make all code and pre-trained de-identification models available to the research community, allowing practitioners to apply them to their datasets and to enable future benchmarks.