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.