A short document accompanying a model, declaring intended use, populations evaluated and known limits, so that out-of-domain use becomes a demonstrable fault.
A model card is a standardized document accompanying a published model, setting out its intended and discouraged uses, its training and evaluation data, performance measured broken down by subpopulation rather than in aggregate, and known limits. The founding idea is simple and it carries far: a model's average performance conceals considerable disparities between groups, and a disaggregated declaration makes visible what a single metric hides. For liability law the significance is greater still than for engineering, because by declaring a domain of use the provider turns use outside that domain into the deployer's act, and symmetrically binds itself to what it declared. The card thus becomes the document around which responsibility is shared between whoever builds and whoever applies, a sharing recent regulatory regimes have taken up by requiring technical documentation of the same nature.
The model card proposal was set out in the paper Model Cards for Model Reporting, presented in January 2019 at the conference on fairness, accountability and transparency, and it has since become the usual documentation format for publicly released models.
model card, fiche de modèle, documentation de modèle