KITH

K-nearest Index of Typicality in Hidden layers

Machine metacognition · Research demo

Checking whether a model has seen images like yours

KITH is a research demo built around a computer model that sorts close-up photos of skin lesions into benign (harmless) or malignant (cancerous). It learned from 5,772 labelled photos.

Give it a photo and you get two results: the model’s answer with its output probability (the probability the network gives its top answer), and a familiarity score showing how closely your photo resembles the photos it learned from.

Your photo stays on your computer. Nothing is uploaded.

A research demo. Not medical advice: if a lesion on your skin worries you, see a doctor.

Combating over-confidence in neural networks.

01

Choose a photo

Pick a JPEG or PNG of a skin lesion, or start from one of the example images, and run the model on it.

02

Read two results

See which label the model chooses, and how similar your image is to the training images it most resembles.

The research question

Models like this one give an answer without saying how they reached it. Adding a form of metacognition, a sense of how well the model knows what it is looking at, could help a model improve its own answers and help it tell people how it arrived at them. Our familiarity score is one attempt at this. It measures how familiar a photo looks to the model compared with the photos it learned from. An unfamiliar photo is not always a problem, but it can be critical when a model is sure but wrong.

Read about the research