In spite of great progress in recent years, deep learning (DNN) and transformers have strong limitations for supporting human–machine teams due to a lack of explainability, information on what exactly was generalized, and machinery to be integrated with various reasoning techniques, and weak defense against possible adversarial attacks of opponent team members. Due to these shortcomings, stand-alone DNNs have limited support for human–machine teams. We propose aMeta-learning/DNN → kNNarchitecture that overcomes these limitations by integrating deep learning with explainable nearest neighbor learning (kNN) to form the object level, having a deductive reasoning-based meta-level control learning process, and performing validation and correction of predictions in a way that is more interpretable by peer team members. We address our proposal from structural and maximum entropy production perspectives.