Automated Trustworthiness Oracle Generation for Machine Learning Text Classifiers

Machine learning (ML) for text classification has been widely used in various domains, such as toxicity detection, chatbot consulting, and review analysis. These applications can significantly impact ethics, economics, and human behavior, raising serious concerns about trusting ML decisions. Several studies indicate that traditional uncertainty metrics, such as model confidence, and performance metrics, like accuracy, are insufficient to build human trust in ML models. These models often learn spurious correlations during training and predict based on them during inference. When deployed in the real world, where such correlations are absent, their performance can deteriorate significantly. To avoid this, a common practice is to test whether predictions are made reasonably based on valid patterns in the data. Along with this, a challenge known as the trustworthiness oracle problem has been introduced. So far, due to the lack of automated trustworthiness oracles, the assessment requires manual validation, based on the decision process disclosed by explanation methods. However, this approach is time-consuming, error-prone, and not scalable.

To address this problem, we propose TOKI, the first automated trustworthiness oracle generation method for text classifiers. TOKI automatically checks whether the words contributing the most to a prediction are semantically related to the predicted class. Specifically, we leverage ML explanation methods to extract the decision-contributing words and measure their semantic relatedness with the class based on word embeddings. As a demonstration of its practical usefulness, we also introduce a novel adversarial attack method that targets trustworthiness vulnerabilities identified by TOKI. We compare TOKI with a naive baseline based solely on model confidence. To evaluate their alignment with human judgement, experiments are conducted on human-created ground truths of approximately 8,000 predictions. Additionally, we compare the effectiveness of TOKI-guided adversarial attack method with A2T, a state-of-the-art adversarial attack method for text classification. Results show that (1) relying on prediction uncertainty metrics, such as model confidence, cannot effectively distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy predictions, (2) TOKI achieves 142% higher accuracy than the naive baseline, and (3) TOKI-guided adversarial attack method is more effective with fewer perturbations than A2T.