Offloading Score: Measuring AI Reliance Through Counterfactual Workflows
AI tools are increasingly integrated into real-world workflows. However, existing measures of reliance on these tools focus on AI output adoption or on self-reported indicators, rather than how task effort is distributed between users and tools. Here, we introduce offloading score, a measure of reliance that quantifies the fraction of cognitive effort offloaded to an AI tool. Offloading Score is simulation-based -- we construct a counterfactual workflow by estimating how the user would have completed the task without the tool, and then computing the fraction of steps saved by using the tool. We validate offloading score through intrinsic evaluations of metric validity, and a controlled us...
| Authors | Vishakh Padmakumar, Lujain Ibrahim, Zora Zhiruo Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 28 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 May 2026 |
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