---
title: "Do AI explanations agree with each other? (research idea)"
description: "Explainable AI is one of the largest topics in the AI journals and is spreading into management, finance and economics. Explanation fidelity (whether an explanation reflects what the model really does) is a fast-rising but still small keyword. When SHAP, LIME and attention maps disagree about the same prediction, which should a loan officer or a doctor believe?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/do-ai-explanations-agree
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/do-ai-explanations-agree.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Do AI explanations agree with each other? (research idea): Explainable AI is one of the largest topics in the AI journals and is spreading into management, finance and economics."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["ai", "methods"]
keywords: ["explainable AI", "explanation fidelity", "faithfulness"]
---

# Do AI explanations agree with each other?

Explainable AI is one of the largest topics in the AI journals and is spreading into management, finance and economics. Explanation fidelity (whether an explanation reflects what the model really does) is a fast-rising but still small keyword. When SHAP, LIME and attention maps disagree about the same prediction, which should a loan officer or a doctor believe?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, "explainable AI" appears on 419 papers (341 in AI journals, 28 in management, 20 in operations research, 15 each in finance and economics). "Explanation fidelity" appears on 11 papers and is rising in the AI journals (6 papers in July–September 2026 against about 1 expected).

## Questions

- How often do common explanation methods disagree about which features drive the same prediction?
- Which of them stay faithful when the model is changed in ways that should change the explanation?
- Do people decide better with explanations that are more faithful, or just with ones that look more confident?

## Possible approach

Compare SHAP, LIME, integrated gradients and attention on standard tabular and text tasks, using tests that check fidelity by perturbing the model or its inputs.

## Next step

Measure how often SHAP and LIME agree on the top features for one credit dataset and one medical dataset, across several model types.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| [explainable AI](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/explainable-ai.md) | 29 | #11 | 16, 23, 10, 19, 24, 20, 25, 20, 18, 28, 20, 25, 12, 20, 25, 27, 21, 27, 28, 34, 36, 37, 27, 20, 42, 29, 40, 33, 46, 42, 49, 46, 38, 24, 37, 38, 25 | 1,026 |
| explanation fidelity | 1 | #2881 | 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1 | 20 |
| faithfulness | 0 | – | 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0 | 18 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Do AI explanations agree with each other?. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/do-ai-explanations-agree

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-do-ai-explanations-agree,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Do AI explanations agree with each other?},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/do-ai-explanations-agree}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).