Post-hoc explanation methods are routinely used to interpret scientific machine learning models, with the deliverable understood to be insight into the phenomenon the model has been trained on. The transition may be taken to be secured once the model is reliable enough and the explanation faithful enough. We argue it is not. Reliability checks that the model's predictions match the phenomenon's outcomes, and faithfulness checks that the explanation matches the model, but neither checks whether the model works as the phenomenon works, which is what a claim about structure requires. The chain can support candidate hypotheses under external corroboration, but it cannot, on its own, support claims about how the phenomenon is in fact structured.
We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method to directly optimize the faithfulness of self-explanations - the extent to which a model's generated reasoning accurately reflects its internal decision-making process. While existing work focuses on evaluating faithfulness or using…
Symbolic Regression (SR) aims to discover analytical equations from observational data and plays a central role in scientific modeling. While recent Large Language Model (LLM) based approaches show promise, they face two limitations. First, they lack data analysis mechanisms for…
Do learned audio embeddings encode structure that nobody told them to encode? We probe four large pretrained audio models (AST, CLAP, BEATs-bio and BirdNET) with a downstream task none of them saw during training: recovering phylogenetic distance from species vocalizations. If th…
Automated detection of vision impairing retina-based ocular conditions from fundus images is important for early screening, timely referral and reducing dependency on specialist-only assessment, for which neural network-based deep learning (DL) models have been widely utilized. H…
Fine-tuning an aligned language model on a narrow stream of bad advice can make it broadly misaligned on questions unrelated to the training data, a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We ask why the narrow lesson generalizes at all, and we find that narrow fine-tuning recru…
Currently, most foundation models can reproduce or strongly depend on copyrighted training content, but output similarity alone is insufficient for infringement detection, because similar outputs may also arise from public-domain concepts, common stylistic conventions, or ordinar…