# The Case for Model Science: Verify, Explore, Steer, Refine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 small](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00593/) (2022)
- [Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10760/) (2022)
- [Model Cards for Model Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03993/) (2018)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07858/) (2022)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07345/) (2023)
- [OpenML: networked science in machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.7722/) (2014)
- [The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03218/) (2024)
- [Fooling LIME and SHAP: Adversarial Attacks on Post hoc Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02508/) (2019)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Machine Learning: Fundamental Principles and 10 Grand Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11251/) (2021)
- [Unmasking Clever Hans Predictors and Assessing What Machines Really Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10178/) (2019)
- [AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15366/) (2021)
- [NLP Evaluation in trouble: On the Need to Measure LLM Data Contamination for each Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18018/) (2023)
- [Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29358/) (2026)
- [OpenML Benchmarking Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03731/) (2017)
- [Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01301/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Interpretability-Guided Soft Pruning of Attention Heads in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00264/) (2026)
- [Modelpedia: A Catalog of Model Findings for the Meta-Science of AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01090/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We argue that the AI community is now ready to move beyond benchmarking and consolidate scattered efforts in model analysis into a systematic discipline, a direction we term Model Science. Complex AI models now serve billions of users, yet our understanding of how they work lags far behind our ability to deploy them. Decades of benchmark-driven research have delivered remarkable progress: extensive leaderboards, a wide range of performance metrics, tracking capability gains across diverse tasks; yet this success has also revealed the limits of benchmarks as they tell us whether models perform but not why they succeed or fail, they miss critical failure modes, such as hallucinations or shortcuts. Precedents from established sciences point the way forward: cognitive science shows that understanding complex systems requires complementary levels of analysis; neuroscience demonstrates that deep study of single cases reveals what population studies miss; medicine teaches that specialised training must develop alongside research practice; and agriculture models how shared infrastructure and principles enable cumulative progress. These lessons inform three foundations for Model Science. First, we propose to consolidate research around four functional perspectives: Verify, Explore, Steer, and Refine that address complementary questions about model behaviour. Second, we discuss the required infrastructure for cumulative knowledge: catalogues of datasets, models and findings. Third, we highlight the need for deep analysis of individual model instances, not just model families, because single cases can reveal what population studies miss.