Test-time augmentation improves efficiency in conformal prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shanmugam, Divya, Lu, Helen, Sankaranarayanan, Swami, Guttag, John
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Shanmugam, Divya
Lu, Helen
Sankaranarayanan, Swami
Guttag, John
author_facet Shanmugam, Divya
Lu, Helen
Sankaranarayanan, Swami
Guttag, John
contents A conformal classifier produces a set of predicted classes and provides a probabilistic guarantee that the set includes the true class. Unfortunately, it is often the case that conformal classifiers produce uninformatively large sets. In this work, we show that test-time augmentation (TTA)--a technique that introduces inductive biases during inference--reduces the size of the sets produced by conformal classifiers. Our approach is flexible, computationally efficient, and effective. It can be combined with any conformal score, requires no model retraining, and reduces prediction set sizes by 10%-14% on average. We conduct an evaluation of the approach spanning three datasets, three models, two established conformal scoring methods, different guarantee strengths, and several distribution shifts to show when and why test-time augmentation is a useful addition to the conformal pipeline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Test-time augmentation improves efficiency in conformal prediction
Shanmugam, Divya
Lu, Helen
Sankaranarayanan, Swami
Guttag, John
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
A conformal classifier produces a set of predicted classes and provides a probabilistic guarantee that the set includes the true class. Unfortunately, it is often the case that conformal classifiers produce uninformatively large sets. In this work, we show that test-time augmentation (TTA)--a technique that introduces inductive biases during inference--reduces the size of the sets produced by conformal classifiers. Our approach is flexible, computationally efficient, and effective. It can be combined with any conformal score, requires no model retraining, and reduces prediction set sizes by 10%-14% on average. We conduct an evaluation of the approach spanning three datasets, three models, two established conformal scoring methods, different guarantee strengths, and several distribution shifts to show when and why test-time augmentation is a useful addition to the conformal pipeline.
title Test-time augmentation improves efficiency in conformal prediction
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22764