Contrastive Conformal Sets

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Alkhatib, Yahya, Tay, Wee Peng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Alkhatib, Yahya
Tay, Wee Peng
author_facet Alkhatib, Yahya
Tay, Wee Peng
contents Contrastive learning produces coherent semantic feature embeddings by encouraging positive samples to cluster closely while separating negative samples. However, existing contrastive learning methods lack principled guarantees on coverage within the semantic feature space. We extend conformal prediction to this setting by introducing minimum-volume covering sets equipped with learnable generalized multi-norm constraints. We propose a method that constructs conformal sets guaranteeing user-specified coverage of positive samples while maximizing negative sample exclusion. We establish theoretically that volume minimization serves as a proxy for negative exclusion, enabling our approach to operate effectively even when negative pairs are unavailable. The positive inclusion guarantee inherits the distribution-free coverage property of conformal prediction, while negative exclusion is maximized through learned set geometry optimized on a held-out training split. Experiments on simulated and real-world image datasets demonstrate improved inclusion-exclusion trade-offs compared to standard distance-based conformal baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26261
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contrastive Conformal Sets
Alkhatib, Yahya
Tay, Wee Peng
Machine Learning
Contrastive learning produces coherent semantic feature embeddings by encouraging positive samples to cluster closely while separating negative samples. However, existing contrastive learning methods lack principled guarantees on coverage within the semantic feature space. We extend conformal prediction to this setting by introducing minimum-volume covering sets equipped with learnable generalized multi-norm constraints. We propose a method that constructs conformal sets guaranteeing user-specified coverage of positive samples while maximizing negative sample exclusion. We establish theoretically that volume minimization serves as a proxy for negative exclusion, enabling our approach to operate effectively even when negative pairs are unavailable. The positive inclusion guarantee inherits the distribution-free coverage property of conformal prediction, while negative exclusion is maximized through learned set geometry optimized on a held-out training split. Experiments on simulated and real-world image datasets demonstrate improved inclusion-exclusion trade-offs compared to standard distance-based conformal baselines.
title Contrastive Conformal Sets
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26261