# Function Composition in Trustworthy Machine Learning: Implementation Choices, Insights, and Questions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09190 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09190/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [A Reductions Approach to Fair Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02453/) (2018)
- [Towards Robust Interpretability with Self-Explaining Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07538/) (2018)
- [Fooling LIME and SHAP: Adversarial Attacks on Post hoc Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02508/) (2019)
- [On Fairness and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02012/) (2017)
- [AI Fairness 360: An Extensible Toolkit for Detecting, Understanding, and Mitigating Unwanted Algorithmic Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01943/) (2018)
- [InterpretML: A Unified Framework for Machine Learning Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09223/) (2019)
- [A comparative study of fairness-enhancing interventions in machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04422/) (2018)
- [The Disagreement Problem in Explainable Machine Learning: A Practitioner's Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01602/) (2022)
- [Is Robustness the Cost of Accuracy? -- A Comprehensive Study on the Robustness of 18 Deep Image Classification Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01688/) (2018)
- [OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11104/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Robustness on In- and Out-Distribution Improves Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09461/) (2020)
- [Differentially Private Representation for NLP: Formal Guarantee and An Empirical Study on Privacy and Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01285/) (2020)
- [A Moral Framework for Understanding of Fair ML through Economic Models of Equality of Opportunity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03400/) (2018)
- [Do the Machine Learning Models on a Crowd Sourced Platform Exhibit Bias? An Empirical Study on Model Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12379/) (2020)
- [Robustness May Be at Odds with Fairness: An Empirical Study on Class-wise Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13365/) (2020)
- [Model Agnostic Contrastive Explanations for Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00117/) (2019)
- [dalex: Responsible Machine Learning with Interactive Explainability and Fairness in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14406/) (2020)
- [Explainability for fair machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07389/) (2020)
- [Fairness and Robustness in Invariant Learning: A Case Study in Toxicity Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06485/) (2020)
- [Active Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00031/) (2018)
- [Marrying Fairness and Explainability in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02947/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty Quantification 360: A Holistic Toolkit for Quantifying and Communicating the Uncertainty of AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01410/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study on Explanations in Out-of-Domain Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00056/) (2022)
- [FairPrep: Promoting Data to a First-Class Citizen in Studies on Fairness-Enhancing Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12587/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AI Steerability 360: A Toolkit for Steering Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07837/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ensuring trustworthiness in machine learning (ML) models is a multi-dimensional task. In addition to the traditional notion of predictive performance, other notions such as privacy, fairness, robustness to distribution shift, adversarial robustness, interpretability, explainability, and uncertainty quantification are important considerations to evaluate and improve (if deficient). However, these sub-disciplines or 'pillars' of trustworthiness have largely developed independently, which has limited us from understanding their interactions in real-world ML pipelines. In this paper, focusing specifically on compositions of functions arising from the different pillars, we aim to reduce this gap, develop new insights for trustworthy ML, and answer questions such as the following. Does the composition of multiple fairness interventions result in a fairer model compared to a single intervention? How do bias mitigation algorithms for fairness affect local post-hoc explanations? Does a defense algorithm for untargeted adversarial attacks continue to be effective when composed with a privacy transformation? Toward this end, we report initial empirical results and new insights from 9 different compositions of functions (or pipelines) on 7 real-world datasets along two trustworthy dimensions - fairness and explainability. We also report progress, and implementation choices, on an extensible composer tool to encourage the combination of functionalities from multiple pillars. To-date, the tool supports bias mitigation algorithms for fairness and post-hoc explainability methods. We hope this line of work encourages the thoughtful consideration of multiple pillars when attempting to formulate and resolve a trustworthiness problem.