Auditing Sybil: Explaining Deep Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Through Generative Interventional Attributions

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sobieski, Bartlomiej, Grzywaczewski, Jakub, Dobiczek, Karol, Wójcik, Mateusz, Bartczak, Tomasz, Szatkowski, Patryk, Bombiński, Przemysław, Tivnan, Matthew, Biecek, Przemyslaw
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Sobieski, Bartlomiej
Grzywaczewski, Jakub
Dobiczek, Karol
Wójcik, Mateusz
Bartczak, Tomasz
Szatkowski, Patryk
Bombiński, Przemysław
Tivnan, Matthew
Biecek, Przemyslaw
author_facet Sobieski, Bartlomiej
Grzywaczewski, Jakub
Dobiczek, Karol
Wójcik, Mateusz
Bartczak, Tomasz
Szatkowski, Patryk
Bombiński, Przemysław
Tivnan, Matthew
Biecek, Przemyslaw
contents Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer mortality, driving the development of automated screening tools to alleviate radiologist workload. Standing at the frontier of this effort is Sybil, a deep learning model capable of predicting future risk solely from computed tomography (CT) with high precision. However, despite extensive clinical validation, current assessments rely purely on observational metrics. This correlation-based approach overlooks the model's actual reasoning mechanism, necessitating a shift to causal verification to ensure robust decision-making before clinical deployment. We propose S(H)NAP, a model-agnostic auditing framework that constructs generative interventional attributions validated by expert radiologists. By leveraging realistic 3D diffusion bridge modeling to systematically modify anatomical features, our approach isolates object-specific causal contributions to the risk score. Providing the first interventional audit of Sybil, we demonstrate that while the model often exhibits behavior akin to an expert radiologist, differentiating malignant pulmonary nodules from benign ones, it suffers from critical failure modes, including dangerous sensitivity to clinically unjustified artifacts and a distinct radial bias.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02560
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Auditing Sybil: Explaining Deep Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Through Generative Interventional Attributions
Sobieski, Bartlomiej
Grzywaczewski, Jakub
Dobiczek, Karol
Wójcik, Mateusz
Bartczak, Tomasz
Szatkowski, Patryk
Bombiński, Przemysław
Tivnan, Matthew
Biecek, Przemyslaw
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer mortality, driving the development of automated screening tools to alleviate radiologist workload. Standing at the frontier of this effort is Sybil, a deep learning model capable of predicting future risk solely from computed tomography (CT) with high precision. However, despite extensive clinical validation, current assessments rely purely on observational metrics. This correlation-based approach overlooks the model's actual reasoning mechanism, necessitating a shift to causal verification to ensure robust decision-making before clinical deployment. We propose S(H)NAP, a model-agnostic auditing framework that constructs generative interventional attributions validated by expert radiologists. By leveraging realistic 3D diffusion bridge modeling to systematically modify anatomical features, our approach isolates object-specific causal contributions to the risk score. Providing the first interventional audit of Sybil, we demonstrate that while the model often exhibits behavior akin to an expert radiologist, differentiating malignant pulmonary nodules from benign ones, it suffers from critical failure modes, including dangerous sensitivity to clinically unjustified artifacts and a distinct radial bias.
title Auditing Sybil: Explaining Deep Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Through Generative Interventional Attributions
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02560