Model Shapley: Equitable Model Valuation with Black-box Access

Valuation methods of data and machine learning (ML) models are essential to the establishment of AI marketplaces. Importantly, certain practical considerations (e.g., operational constraints, legal restrictions) favor the use of model valuation over data valuation. Also, existing marketplaces that involve trading of pre-trained ML models call for an equitable model valuation method to price them. In particular, we investigate the black-box access setting which allows querying a model (to observe predictions) without disclosing model-specific information (e.g., architecture and parameters). By exploiting a Dirichlet abstraction of a model’s predictions, we propose a novel and equitable model valuation method called model Shapley. We also leverage a Lipschitz continuity of model Shapley to design a learning approach for predicting the model Shapley values (MSVs) of many vendors’ models (e.g., 150) in a large-scale marketplace. We perform extensive empirical validation on the effectiveness of model Shapley using various real-world datasets and heterogeneous model types.