SageMaker Clarify Online Explainability Not Supported for Multi-Container Endpoints from Canvas HPO Models

[xiaohui-hiwintech]

I trained a binary classification model using SageMaker Canvas HPO (Hyperparameter Optimization).
The model generated by HPO is deployed as a multi-container model (3 containers).

I would like to redeploy this model as a SageMaker endpoint with online explainability enabled via SageMaker Clarify (SHAP). However, when creating the endpoint configuration with ExplainerConfig, I encounter the following error:

An error occurred (ValidationException) when calling the CreateEndpointConfig operation:
Multi-Container is not supported when specifying an ExplainerConfig.

Code Snippet

def create_endpoint_config(config, sm_client):
    try:
        endpoint_config_response = sm_client.create_endpoint_config(
            EndpointConfigName=config["endpoint_config_name"],
            ProductionVariants=[
                {
                    "VariantName": "primary",
                    "ModelName": config["original_model_name"],
                    "InstanceType": "ml.m5.large",
                    "InitialInstanceCount": 1,
                    "InitialVariantWeight": 1.0
                }
            ],
            ExplainerConfig={
                "ClarifyExplainerConfig": {
                    "ShapConfig": {
                        "ShapBaselineConfig": {
                            "ShapBaseline": config["shap_baseline"],
                            "MimeType": config["shap_baseline_mime_type"]
                        },
                        "NumberOfSamples": 100,
                        "Seed": 42
                    },
                    "EnableExplanations": "ALL",
                    "InferenceConfig": {
                        "FeatureTypes": config["feature_types"]
                    }
                }
            }
        )
        return endpoint_config_response["EndpointConfigArn"]
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"create_endpoint_config failed: {str(e)}")
        sys.exit(1)

Question

Does this limitation mean that models produced by SageMaker Canvas HPO (which are deployed as multi-container models) cannot use SageMaker Clarify online explainability to generate SHAP values?

I couldn’t find any explicit mention of this restriction in the official documentation. What I found is: The SageMaker Clarify explainer is model agnostic.