Quantifying Model Uniqueness in Heterogeneous AI Ecosystems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22977v1
• Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:41:53 GMT
• Title: Quantifying Model Uniqueness in Heterogeneous AI Ecosystems
• Authors: Lei You,
• Abstract summary: We introduce a statistical framework for auditing model uniqueness based on In-Silico Quasi-Experimental Design.<n>By enforcing matched interventions across models, we isolate intrinsic model identity and quantify uniqueness as the Peer-Inexpressible Residual (PIER)<n>These results move trustworthy AI beyond explaining single models.
• Score: 1.1162481475388237
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: As AI systems evolve from isolated predictors into complex, heterogeneous ecosystems of foundation models and specialized adapters, distinguishing genuine behavioral novelty from functional redundancy becomes a critical governance challenge. Here, we introduce a statistical framework for auditing model uniqueness based on In-Silico Quasi-Experimental Design (ISQED). By enforcing matched interventions across models, we isolate intrinsic model identity and quantify uniqueness as the Peer-Inexpressible Residual (PIER), i.e. the component of a target's behavior strictly irreducible to any stochastic convex combination of its peers, with vanishing PIER characterizing when such a routing-based substitution becomes possible. We establish the theoretical foundations of ecosystem auditing through three key contributions. First, we prove a fundamental limitation of observational logs: uniqueness is mathematically non-identifiable without intervention control. Second, we derive a scaling law for active auditing, showing that our adaptive query protocol achieves minimax-optimal sample efficiency ($dσ^2γ^{-2}\log(Nd/δ)$). Third, we demonstrate that cooperative game-theoretic methods, such as Shapley values, fundamentally fail to detect redundancy. We implement this framework via the DISCO (Design-Integrated Synthetic Control) estimator and deploy it across diverse ecosystems, including computer vision models (ResNet/ConvNeXt/ViT), large language models (BERT/RoBERTa), and city-scale traffic forecasters. These results move trustworthy AI beyond explaining single models: they establish a principled, intervention-based science of auditing and governing heterogeneous model ecosystems.

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