Model Transferability with Responsive Decision Subjects

Yang Liu, Yatong Chen, Zeyu Tang, Kun Zhang

Keywords: transferability, responsive decision subjects, induced distribution shift, human-ML interaction, performance bound

TL;DR: This paper studies model transferability when human decision subjects respond to a deployed machine learning model.

Abstract: This paper studies model transferability when human decision subjects respond to a deployed machine learning model. In our setting, an agent or a user corresponds to a sample $(X,Y)$ drawn from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ and will face a model $h$ and its classification result $h(X)$. Agents can modify $X$ to adapt to $h$, which will incur a distribution shift on $(X,Y)$. Therefore, when training $h$, the learner will need to consider the subsequently ``induced" distribution when the output model is deployed. Our formulation is motivated by applications where the deployed machine learning models interact with human agents, and will ultimately face \emph{responsive} and interactive data distributions. We formalize the discussions of the transferability of a model by studying how the model trained on the available source distribution (data) would translate to the performance on the induced domain. We provide both upper bounds for the performance gap due to the induced domain shift, as well as lower bound for the trade-offs that a classifier has to suffer on either the source training distribution or the induced target distribution. We provide further instantiated analysis for two popular domain adaptation settings with covariate shift and target shift.

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