Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Jang, Sooyong, Lee, Insup
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11472
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866908656093626368
author Jang, Sooyong
Lee, Insup
author_facet Jang, Sooyong
Lee, Insup
contents Conformal prediction constructs a set of labels instead of a single point prediction, while providing a probabilistic coverage guarantee. Beyond the coverage guarantee, adaptiveness to example difficulty is an important property. It means that the method should produce larger prediction sets for more difficult examples, and smaller ones for easier examples. Existing evaluation methods for adaptiveness typically analyze coverage rate violation or average set size across bins of examples grouped by difficulty. However, these approaches often suffer from imbalanced binning, which can lead to inaccurate estimates of coverage or set size. To address this issue, we propose a binning method that leverages input transformations to sort examples by difficulty, followed by uniform-mass binning. Building on this binning, we introduce two metrics to better evaluate adaptiveness. These metrics provide more reliable estimates of coverage rate violation and average set size due to balanced binning, leading to more accurate adaptivity assessment. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed metric correlates more strongly with the desired adaptiveness property compared to existing ones. Furthermore, motivated by our findings, we propose a new adaptive prediction set algorithm that groups examples by estimated difficulty and applies group-conditional conformal prediction. This allows us to determine appropriate thresholds for each group. Experimental results on both (a) an Image Classification (ImageNet) (b) a medical task (visual acuity prediction) show that our method outperforms existing approaches according to the new metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_11472
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying and Improving Adaptivity in Conformal Prediction through Input Transformations
Jang, Sooyong
Lee, Insup
Machine Learning
Conformal prediction constructs a set of labels instead of a single point prediction, while providing a probabilistic coverage guarantee. Beyond the coverage guarantee, adaptiveness to example difficulty is an important property. It means that the method should produce larger prediction sets for more difficult examples, and smaller ones for easier examples. Existing evaluation methods for adaptiveness typically analyze coverage rate violation or average set size across bins of examples grouped by difficulty. However, these approaches often suffer from imbalanced binning, which can lead to inaccurate estimates of coverage or set size. To address this issue, we propose a binning method that leverages input transformations to sort examples by difficulty, followed by uniform-mass binning. Building on this binning, we introduce two metrics to better evaluate adaptiveness. These metrics provide more reliable estimates of coverage rate violation and average set size due to balanced binning, leading to more accurate adaptivity assessment. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed metric correlates more strongly with the desired adaptiveness property compared to existing ones. Furthermore, motivated by our findings, we propose a new adaptive prediction set algorithm that groups examples by estimated difficulty and applies group-conditional conformal prediction. This allows us to determine appropriate thresholds for each group. Experimental results on both (a) an Image Classification (ImageNet) (b) a medical task (visual acuity prediction) show that our method outperforms existing approaches according to the new metrics.
title Quantifying and Improving Adaptivity in Conformal Prediction through Input Transformations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11472