We study the problem of monitoring machine learning models under gradual distribution shifts, where circumstances change slowly over time, often leading to unnoticed yet significant declines in accuracy. To address this, we propose Incremental Uncertainty-aware Performance Monitoring (IUPM), a novel label-free method that estimates performance changes by modeling gradual shifts using optimal transport. In addition, IUPM quantifies the uncertainty in the performance prediction and introduces an active labeling procedure to restore a reliable estimate under a limited labeling budget. Our experiments show that IUPM outperforms existing performance estimation baselines in various gradual shift scenarios and that its uncertainty awareness guides label acquisition more effectively compared to other strategies.

To ensure the trustworthiness and interpretability of AI systems, it is essential to align machine learning models with human domain knowledge. This can be a challenging and time-consuming endeavor that requires close communication between data scientists and domain experts. Recent leaps in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can help alleviate this burden. In this paper, we propose a Mixture of Rule Experts guided by a Large Language Model (MoRE-LLM) which combines a data-driven black-box model with knowledge extracted from an LLM to enable domain knowledge-aligned and transparent predictions. While the introduced Mixture of Rule Experts (MoRE) steers the discovery of local rule-based surrogates during training and their utilization for the classification task, the LLM is responsible for enhancing the domain knowledge alignment of the rules by correcting and contextualizing them. Importantly, our method does not rely on access to the LLM during test time and ensures interpretability while not being prone to LLM-based confabulations. We evaluate our method on several tabular data sets and compare its performance with interpretable and non-interpretable baselines. Besides performance, we evaluate our grey-box method with respect to the utilization of interpretable rules. In addition to our quantitative evaluation, we shed light on how the LLM can provide additional context to strengthen the comprehensibility and trustworthiness of the model's reasoning process.

Monitoring and maintaining machine learning models are among the most critical challenges in translating recent advances in the field into real-world applications. However, current monitoring methods lack the capability of provide actionable insights answering the question of why the performance of a particular model really degraded. In this work, we propose a novel approach to explain the behavior of a black-box model under feature shifts by attributing an estimated performance change to interpretable input characteristics. We refer to our method that combines concepts from Optimal Transport and Shapley Values as Explanatory Performance Estimation (XPE). We analyze the underlying assumptions and demonstrate the superiority of our approach over several baselines on different data sets across various data modalities such as images, audio, and tabular data. We also indicate how the generated results can lead to valuable insights, enabling explanatory model monitoring by revealing potential root causes for model deterioration and guiding toward actionable countermeasures.