Chandan Singh
Publications
Do explanations generalize across large reasoning models?
Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce a textual chain of thought (CoT) in the process of solving a problem, which serves as a potentially powerful tool to understand the problem by surfacing a human-readable, natural-language explanation. However, it is unclear whether these explanations generalize, i.e. whether they capture general patterns about the underlying problem rather than patterns which are esoteric to the LRM. This is a crucial question in understanding or discovering new concepts, e.g. in AI for science. We study this generalization question by evaluating a specific notion of generalizability: whether explanations produced by one LRM induce the same behavior when given to other LRMs. We find that CoT explanations often exhibit this form of generalization (i.e. they increase consistency between LRMs) and that this increased generalization is correlated with human preference rankings and post-training with reinforcement learning. We further analyze the conditions under which explanations yield consistent answers and propose a straightforward, sentence-level ensembling strategy that improves consistency. Taken together, these results prescribe caution when using LRM explanations to yield new insights and outline a framework for characterizing LRM explanation generalization.
Human-AI Co-design for Clinical Prediction Models
Developing safe, effective, and practically useful clinical prediction models (CPMs) traditionally requires iterative collaboration between clinical experts, data scientists, and informaticists. This process refines the often small but critical details of the model building process, such as which features/patients to include and how clinical categories should be defined. However, this traditional collaboration process is extremely time- and resource-intensive, resulting in only a small fraction of CPMs reaching clinical practice. This challenge intensifies when teams attempt to incorporate unstructured clinical notes, which can contain an enormous number of concepts. To address this challenge, we introduce HACHI, an iterative human-in-the-loop framework that uses AI agents to accelerate the development of fully interpretable CPMs by enabling the exploration of concepts in clinical notes. HACHI alternates between (i) an AI agent rapidly exploring and evaluating candidate concepts in clinical notes and (ii) clinical and domain experts providing feedback to improve the CPM learning process. HACHI defines concepts as simple yes-no questions that are used in linear models, allowing the clinical AI team to transparently review, refine, and validate the CPM learned in each round. In two real-world prediction tasks (acute kidney injury and traumatic brain injury), HACHI outperforms existing approaches, surfaces new clinically relevant concepts not included in commonly-used CPMs, and improves model generalizability across clinical sites and time periods. Furthermore, HACHI reveals the critical role of the clinical AI team, such as directing the AI agent to explore concepts that it had not previously considered, adjusting the granularity of concepts it considers, changing the objective function to better align with the clinical objectives, and identifying issues of data bias and leakage.