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Main Authors: Finocchiaro, Jessica, Ganson, Victor, Khurana, Drona
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23017
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author Finocchiaro, Jessica
Ganson, Victor
Khurana, Drona
author_facet Finocchiaro, Jessica
Ganson, Victor
Khurana, Drona
contents One prominent method of evaluating machine learning model trustworthiness is the notion of calibration. In the binary outcome setting, a probabilistic predictor is calibrated if outcomes are realized according to a model's distributional prediction, conditioned on this prediction. Straightforward extensions of binary calibration definitions to probabilistic multiclass classifiers suffer from an exponential complexity blowup as the space of predictions grows exponentially in the number of classes $n$. As a remedy, Noarov and Roth (2023) propose multiclass calibration with predictions that are properties of the outcome distribution, reducing complexity from growing in the number of classes $n$ to the dimension $d$ of the property, called its elicitation complexity. Previous work on approximate property calibration is generally limited to continuous scalar properties, despite many relevant properties of interest being discrete, like the mode or rankings. We characterize the approximate property calibration of discrete properties which are strongly orderable by using Lipschitz continuous properties as an intermediary. This work is the first to our knowledge to provide approximate calibration results for discrete properties. Along the way, we characterize the Lipschitz elicitation complexity of strongly orderable discrete properties by constructing algorithms for designing these Lipschitz properties, which we prove can be post-processed to obtain the original discrete property.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_23017
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Smoothed Elicitation Complexity for Approximate $Γ$-calibration of Discrete Classification Tasks
Finocchiaro, Jessica
Ganson, Victor
Khurana, Drona
Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
One prominent method of evaluating machine learning model trustworthiness is the notion of calibration. In the binary outcome setting, a probabilistic predictor is calibrated if outcomes are realized according to a model's distributional prediction, conditioned on this prediction. Straightforward extensions of binary calibration definitions to probabilistic multiclass classifiers suffer from an exponential complexity blowup as the space of predictions grows exponentially in the number of classes $n$. As a remedy, Noarov and Roth (2023) propose multiclass calibration with predictions that are properties of the outcome distribution, reducing complexity from growing in the number of classes $n$ to the dimension $d$ of the property, called its elicitation complexity. Previous work on approximate property calibration is generally limited to continuous scalar properties, despite many relevant properties of interest being discrete, like the mode or rankings. We characterize the approximate property calibration of discrete properties which are strongly orderable by using Lipschitz continuous properties as an intermediary. This work is the first to our knowledge to provide approximate calibration results for discrete properties. Along the way, we characterize the Lipschitz elicitation complexity of strongly orderable discrete properties by constructing algorithms for designing these Lipschitz properties, which we prove can be post-processed to obtain the original discrete property.
title Smoothed Elicitation Complexity for Approximate $Γ$-calibration of Discrete Classification Tasks
topic Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23017