arXiv Machine Learning

Trustworthy synthetic data for campaign decision support: strategy simulation fidelity and the PolicySynth framework

arXiv:2607. 11269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision support systems (DSS) increasingly run retention what-if analysis on synthetic customer populations, because privacy constraints preclude unrestricted use of real data.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Lottery Tickets Are Not Deployment Tickets

arXiv:2607. 27031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reports on how sparsification, compression, and lottery tickets change model behavior have been mixed in the prior literature, with beneficial effects observed in some studies and adverse effects in others.

By Bum Jun Kim
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 23

Do Synthetic Personas Predict Real Audience Response? A Sim-to-Real Study Where a No-Persona Baseline Beats Persona-Based Copy Simulation

The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) used as synthetic personas can predict real audience responses to marketing copy. Using thousands of headline A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, the authors compare a ten-persona panel grounded in real audience demographics to a no-persona zero‑shot baseline that asks the model for a typical reader’s click likelihood. Results show that the no‑persona baseline outperforms the persona‑based approach, with higher predictive validity and top‑1 accuracy, indicating that forcing the model to role‑play specific personas introduces bias and noise.

By Alexandre Cristov\~ao Maiorano
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

The Hidden Costs of 99% Accuracy: A Trustworthiness Audit of the Telco Customer Churn Benchmark

The paper audits the IBM Telco Customer Churn benchmark, revealing that common practices inflate performance metrics. It shows that pre‑split SMOTE boosts churn‑class F1 by 13.1 points, that isotonic regression is the best calibration method while temperature scaling fails on tree ensembles, and that the cost‑optimal decision threshold is 5–10 times lower than the F1‑optimal one, saving about $77,000 per 1,000 customers. The authors also test generalisation on Iranian Telecom and Bank churn datasets, and propose a four‑component reporting checklist with reproducible code.

By Soumyadeep Roy
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

SFGA: A Statistics-First Gating Architecture with Adjudicative Escalation for Trustworthy SFT Data Procurement

Procuring supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data forces a buyer to decide, before any downstream training, whether a candidate corpus is worth acquiring. We present \sys{}, a statistics-first gating architecture that treats procurement as a cost-aware routing problem over three intrinsic quality axes -- diversity, utility, and redundancy.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

GAUGE: When Not to Trust LLM-as-a-Judge in User-Simulated Evaluation of Task-Oriented Agents

GAUGE is a new offline protocol that evaluates whether the common practice of using an LLM-as-a-judge to rank task‑oriented agents actually aligns with a verifiable reward. Across 25 agents from six providers on two benchmarks, GAUGE finds that user satisfaction scores are largely uncorrelated with task success, and that the judge’s ranking loses precision when agents are closely matched in performance. The study highlights a gap between ranking validity and construct validity in current evaluation practices.

By Umesh Bodhwani, Thanh Tran, Kai Wei
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

A Filtered Mixture-of-Generators for Fully Synthetic Survival Training

arXiv:2607. 00127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Survival analysis models time-to-event data, but in clinical settings training data are costly and scarce: events accrue over years of follow-up, cohorts are small, and privacy regulations restrict sharing across institutions.

By Niccol\`o Maria Rizzi, Eugenio Lomurno, Alberto Archetti, Matteo Matteucci