# PEAK: Explainable Privacy Assistant through Automated Knowledge Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02079 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02079/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00069/) (2018)
- [Interpretation of Neural Networks is Fragile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10547/) (2017)
- [Fooling LIME and SHAP: Adversarial Attacks on Post hoc Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02508/) (2019)
- [The (Un)reliability of saliency methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00867/) (2017)
- [Metrics for Explainable AI: Challenges and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04608/) (2018)
- [Towards a Visual Privacy Advisor: Understanding and Predicting Privacy Risks in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10660/) (2017)
- [The Application of Two-level Attention Models in Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.6447/) (2014)
- [Image Privacy Prediction Using Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03695/) (2019)
- [Uncertainty-aware Personal Assistant for Making Personalized Privacy Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06544/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The impact of abstract and object tags on image privacy classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07976/) (2025)
- [PrivLEX: Detecting legal concepts in images through Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09449/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the realm of online privacy, privacy assistants play a pivotal role in empowering users to manage their privacy effectively. Although recent studies have shown promising progress in tackling tasks such as privacy violation detection and personalized privacy recommendations, a crucial aspect for widespread user adoption is the capability of these systems to provide explanations for their decision-making processes. This paper presents a privacy assistant for generating explanations for privacy decisions. The privacy assistant focuses on discovering latent topics, identifying explanation categories, establishing explanation schemes, and generating automated explanations. The generated explanations can be used by users to understand the recommendations of the privacy assistant. Our user study of real-world privacy dataset of images shows that users find the generated explanations useful and easy to understand. Additionally, the generated explanations can be used by privacy assistants themselves to improve their decision-making. We show how this can be realized by incorporating the generated explanations into a state-of-the-art privacy assistant.