Shapley values are widely used to attribute value to training data based on their marginal contribution to performance on a validation set. Existing practice often assumes these values are stable once the training data and model are fixed. In this work, we uncover a systematic vulnerability: even modest changes to the validation set, such as introducing noises, cause directional shifts in Shapley distributions. As noises are added, Shapley values of training samples compress toward zero. We trace this to a noise-induced neighborhood reshuffling effect: perturbations alter the local rank order between validation and training samples, flattening the valuation landscape. Using the KNN-Shapley framework, we show through synthetic and real data that these shifts are consistent and reproducible. Our findings challenge the assumption of Shapley stability and reveal a new axis of fragility in data valuation. We propose normalization and boundary-aware validation strategies to mitigate these distortions and enable more robust, interpretable valuation in machine learning marketplaces.
The success of deep learning models in classification and regression is widely attributed to the low-dimensional structure that real-world data tend to exhibit, despite their high-dimensional representation. This work attempts to provide a mathematical framework for binary classi…
For two decades, the standard remedy for class-imbalanced learning has been to fabricate synthetic minority examples, and the standard evidence of their validity has been a check that cannot fail: synthetic points are scored against the very data that generated them. We de-bias t…
Data Shapley answers which training points are worth what, and its nearest-neighbor specialization is the version actually deployed, shipped by toolkits such as pyDVL and OpenDataVal. Exact algorithms exist for unweighted nearest-neighbor classification and regression, and recent…
Determining molecular structures from spectroscopic data remains fundamentally challenging because the inverse problem is intrinsically underdetermined: individual spectra are sparse, low-dimensional, and encode only partial structural evidence relative to the vast space of possi…
Large language models are increasingly used as open-ended search operators in evolutionary optimization. We introduce Evolutionary Feature Engineering (EFE), a framework for using LLM-based evolution to discover preprocessing transformations for structured data. EFE represents tr…
Transformers have become general-purpose architectures, but their all-to-all self-attention is poorly matched to graph data, whose interactions are sparse, structured and multi-scale. Existing Graph Transformers address this mismatch through structural encodings, hybrid message-p…