Conformal Prediction for Long-Tailed Classification
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866908854966550528 |
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| author | Ding, Tiffany Fermanian, Jean-Baptiste Salmon, Joseph |
| author_facet | Ding, Tiffany Fermanian, Jean-Baptiste Salmon, Joseph |
| contents | Many real-world classification problems, such as plant identification, have extremely long-tailed class distributions. In order for prediction sets to be useful in such settings, they should (i) provide good class-conditional coverage, ensuring that rare classes are not systematically omitted from the prediction sets, and (ii) be a reasonable size, allowing users to easily verify candidate labels. Unfortunately, existing conformal prediction methods, when applied to the long-tailed setting, force practitioners to make a binary choice between small sets with poor class-conditional coverage or sets that have very good class-conditional coverage but are extremely large. We propose methods with marginal coverage guarantees that smoothly trade off set size and class-conditional coverage. First, we introduce a new conformal score function called prevalence-adjusted softmax that optimizes for macro-coverage, defined as the average class-conditional coverage across classes. Second, we propose a new procedure that interpolates between marginal and class-conditional conformal prediction by linearly interpolating their conformal score thresholds. We demonstrate our methods on Pl@ntNet-300K and iNaturalist-2018, two long-tailed image datasets with 1,081 and 8,142 classes, respectively. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06867 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Conformal Prediction for Long-Tailed Classification Ding, Tiffany Fermanian, Jean-Baptiste Salmon, Joseph Machine Learning Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Methodology Many real-world classification problems, such as plant identification, have extremely long-tailed class distributions. In order for prediction sets to be useful in such settings, they should (i) provide good class-conditional coverage, ensuring that rare classes are not systematically omitted from the prediction sets, and (ii) be a reasonable size, allowing users to easily verify candidate labels. Unfortunately, existing conformal prediction methods, when applied to the long-tailed setting, force practitioners to make a binary choice between small sets with poor class-conditional coverage or sets that have very good class-conditional coverage but are extremely large. We propose methods with marginal coverage guarantees that smoothly trade off set size and class-conditional coverage. First, we introduce a new conformal score function called prevalence-adjusted softmax that optimizes for macro-coverage, defined as the average class-conditional coverage across classes. Second, we propose a new procedure that interpolates between marginal and class-conditional conformal prediction by linearly interpolating their conformal score thresholds. We demonstrate our methods on Pl@ntNet-300K and iNaturalist-2018, two long-tailed image datasets with 1,081 and 8,142 classes, respectively. |
| title | Conformal Prediction for Long-Tailed Classification |
| topic | Machine Learning Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Methodology |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06867 |