Measuring the collaboration, not the agent

Abstract

Benchmarks for visualization agents score the agent alone; the human only supplies reference answers. For high-dimensional data this misses what matters: the knowledge of which variables count is held by on-site experts, not by the model, so the useful question is how well an analyst and an agent do together. We study one specific form of collaboration, the agent proposes a view, the analyst accepts, rejects, or modifies it, and those judgments are kept for later sessions, and propose five measures for it: complementarity, intervention efficiency, appropriate reliance, knowledge retention, and agency. The first four are computed from interaction logs alone. We test the measures, not people: in a testbed for parallel-coordinates design on public manufacturing data (UCI SECOM), with a simulated analyst whose behavior we control, all four are computable and respond to the controlled differences. Whether they reveal anything about real analysts is the next step; we release the testbed for it.