"Where Can I Trust You?": Boundary-Aware Evaluation of Surrogate Fidelity
Surrogate models are commonly evaluated by how often they agree with their teacher model over an evaluation set. Local variation in this agreement is well known, but its structure and consequences are less clear. We ask whether disagreement is systematically concentrated near the teacher's decision boundary and whether retaining that structure provides information beyond a single global score. Across several datasets and surrogate model classes, we find substantially lower fidelity near teacher decision boundaries under two different methods of identifying near-boundary examples. Moreover, conditioning agreement on confidence-defined regions improves prediction of teacher--surrogate agree...
| Authors | Jackson Eshbaugh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 26 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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