Measuring What Matters: Synthetic Benchmarks for Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept bottleneck models predict outcomes from high-level concepts detected in inputs. Although concepts provide a simple way to reap benefits from interpretability, very few datasets include concept labels. This limits researchers' ability to determine which problems are suitable for these models, isolate the factors that drive their performance or lead to failures, or uncover which algorithms perform well. In this paper, we develop synthetic benchmarks for concept-bottleneck models, focusing on their two main use cases: decision support, in which models assist humans in making better decisions, and automation, in which models handle routine tasks without supervision. Our benchmarks can generate labeled datasets while controlling for properties that affect performance, including data modality, concept choice, annotation quality, and completeness. We demonstrate how the benchmarks can be used to evaluate representative classes of concept bottleneck models. Our demonstrations show how the benchmarks can diagnose failure modes and guide follow-up testing.

Statistical Inference for Responsiveness Verification

Many safety failures in machine learning arise when models are used to assign predictions to people (often in settings like lending, hiring, or content moderation) without accounting for how individuals can change their inputs. In this work, we introduce a formal validation procedure for the responsiveness of predictions with respect to interventions on their features. Our procedure frames responsiveness as a type of sensitivity analysis in which practitioners control a set of changes by specifying constraints over interventions and distributions over downstream effects. We describe how to estimate responsiveness for the predictions of any model and any dataset using only black-box access, and how to use these estimates to support tasks such as falsification and failure probability estimation. We develop algorithms that construct these estimates by generating a uniform sample of reachable points, and demonstrate how they can promote safety in real-world applications such as recidivism prediction, organ transplant prioritization, and content moderation.