arXiv Machine Learning

The Price of Choice in Selective Prediction

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

A Joint Finite-Sample Certificate for Adaptive Selective Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2606. 08517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective predictors answer on confident inputs and abstain elsewhere; deploying one safely needs a single finite-sample certificate that simultaneously upper-bounds the selected risk, lower-bounds the acceptance probability $\pacc$ above a floor $\pmin$, and lower-bounds the deployment utility.

By Xiaoli Yu, Jiamiao Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Available Guardrails: Certifying Selective Prediction across ML Systems

The paper introduces a method to certify selective prediction in machine learning systems by computing the availability of safety gates through exact-binomial inversion and dynamic programming. It demonstrates that a truth-informed planner can significantly improve mean coverage over naive approaches, and that reallocating error budgets further enhances coverage across diverse applications such as LLM tool‑calling, content moderation, lesion classification, and recommendation. The study highlights the importance of planning and finite‑sample estimation in ensuring reliable, granular deployment of selective predictors.

By Parivesh Priye, Yufeng Wang, Haibin Ling, Michael Chaykowsky
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

StepCOPS: Closed-Testing Lower-Tail Certificates for Language-Model Policy Selection

StepCOPS is a new method for selecting a language‑model policy from many checkpoints, prompts, and decoding rules by providing closed‑testing lower‑tail certificates. It uses an independent proposal split to nominate a lower‑tail floor for each candidate, applies exact binomial tests on a fresh certification split, and employs Holm’s step‑down procedure to certify a set of floors. In experiments across 24 configurations and 11 benchmarks, StepCOPS achieves 96.4% selected‑policy coverage, raises the certified floor by 1.5 points over prior methods, stays 0.6 points below a large‑reference jury oracle, and abstains in 2.4% of trials.

By Ibne Farabi Shihab, Sanjeda Akter, Anuj Sharma
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Selection-Safe Conformal Early Exit: Distribution-Free Coverage under Adaptive Depth

The paper introduces a selection‑safe conformal early‑exit method that calibrates a single split‑conformal quantile using a terminal‑path score derived from prefix maxima. This approach guarantees coverage for any data‑dependent stopping policy that preserves terminal‑set containment, without requiring an α/L correction. Empirical results on eight encoder backbones and CIFAR‑100 show that pathwise selection achieves higher macro coverage (0.901 vs. 0.814) with smaller set sizes and lower latency fractions compared to naive layer‑wise selection, and remains robust to deployment‑time budget changes.

By Adria Binte Habib, Ibne Farabi Shihab