arXiv Machine Learning

Certified by Abstention: Distribution-Free Guarantees for Chain-of-Thought Verifiers at Small Calibration Budgets

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

A distribution-free certification framework for trustworthy crash-severity prediction

The paper introduces a distribution‑free certification layer that can be applied to any crash‑severity prediction model without modifying the model itself. It provides guarantees for ordinal outcomes, per‑class validity, transfer of coverage to unobserved severities, and one‑sided certificates under deployment shift, all grounded in a functional of the true data law. The framework is evaluated on 5.2 million Texas records, demonstrating a model‑independent lower bound on set width for vulnerable road users and is released as an open‑source package with theorem‑level tests.

By Amir Rafe, Subasish Das
arXiv AI
Aug 19

An Omitted Mode Is a Rare Rule: The Sampling-Verification Danger Law in Continuous Code World Models

The paper investigates the safety of Code World Models, where a language model generates executable world models that a planner uses. It shows that accepting a model based on sampled transitions only guarantees sample consistency, not full safety, because the probability of missing critical events decays as (1‑r)^N. Experiments on hybrid instruments reveal that omitted mode‑boundaries can severely limit planner performance, and that even sophisticated LLMs (GPT‑5.x) struggle to repair such omissions in higher‑dimensional settings.

By Javier Aguilar Mart\'in
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Calibration, Not Compilation: Detecting and Repairing Misspecified Probabilistic Programs Written by Language Models

arXiv:2606. 31630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly write probabilistic programs (in NumPyro, Stan, or Pyro), but a program that compiles, runs, and passes every unit test can still be \emph{statistically} wrong -- a Gaussian likelihood for heavy-tailed data, a Poisson for over-dispersed counts, an invalid prior support, or a pathological parameterization.

By Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 3

When Can a Machine Trust a Statute? A Survival Certificate for Machine-Extracted Legal Logic

The paper investigates the reliability of machine‑parsed statutes by developing a passive survival certificate for the Duquenne‑Guigues implication basis of extracted legal contexts. It measures inter‑extractor disagreement, runs 1,000 Monte‑Carlo trials, and certifies an implication only when a one‑sided Wilson 95% lower bound on survival reaches 0.95, providing premise spans and minimal counterexamples. Applied to 29,365 Missouri sections and 502 Indian central‑Act sections, the method passes a held‑out gate for many statute families, yet a global error model shows that 93.2% of held‑out chapters fall below the informativeness floor, attributing this to calibration‑rate transfer rather than selection bias.

By Surya Saka
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

The Price of Self-Calibration: Exact Evidence Budgets and Manufactured Blind Sets in Adaptive Monitoring

The paper derives precise cost formulas for self‑calibrating monitors that adjust thresholds online to maintain a specified long‑run false‑alarm rate under arbitrary drift. It shows that the guarantee is an accounting identity, independent of the monitored signal, and provides exact evidence identities for both step and ramp drift scenarios, as well as an exact law for the fluctuation of the certificate’s own alarm rate. Additionally, it proves that any monitor designed to tolerate a drift class is blind to all faults in the difference of that class, identifying the blind set for speed‑bounded drift classes and quantifying power outside this set with a sharp Gaussian projection bound.

By Abdou-Raouf Atarmla