XAI-Driven Confidence Estimation for OOD-Resilient Runtime Prediction

arXiv:2611.13199v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Machine learning-based resource management (RM) models degrade under out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs at runtime, yet existing approaches in the literature rely on a single global error margin that is overly conservative and fails to distinguish reliablepredictions from catastrophic failures. We propose Lightweight Runtime EXplainability (LEX), the first post-hoc XAI framework for input-specific runtime confidence estimation in ML-based RM. LEX clusters the embeddings of the training input space using a Gaussian Mixture Model and associates per-cluster prediction error bounds to input samples, enabling fine-grained runtime confidence signals without retraining. Evaluated on a state-of-the-art LSTM-based IPS forecasting model on Intel Alder Lake, across 34 benchmark applications, LEX achieves ~94% containment on unseen workloads and produces ~17% tighter per-input confidence bounds than global baselines. With its negligible runtime overhead, LEX advances the field by providing explainable and reliable input-specific confidence signals of ML predictions, thereby making ML-based resource management resilient to OOD at runtime.