In any project, you need some basic milestones/OKRS + something measurable, like a KPI. If the management layer around you did not structure their communication

In any project, you need some basic milestones/OKRS + something measurable, like a KPI. If the management layer around you did not structure their communication with you around these, that was their shortcoming perhaps. You could certainly have compensated by putting these in place yourself, which would have shown some initiative and leadership. For example, you could conceptually divide your project into various stages, with milestones in each, then communicate any road-blocks that prevented you moving to the next stage. You could also create a KPI for your model (or a few KPIs), like a % success-rate for a classifier against some kind of benchmark data-set. Even non-technical people can understand "we're at 60% now, and we aim to get to 95% by the end of the project". Ultimately, people do not care about the unusual edge-case or bug that you're dealing with - they care about the output. Perhaps structure your communication to focus on outputs, not the minutia of technical steps along the way.