The paper introduces a framework for synthetic‑augmented inference that balances the number of synthetic observations with their assigned weight. It defines a size‑weight frontier, estimating for each weight the maximum synthetic sample size that still guarantees target task‑marginal coverage for all smaller sizes. The authors provide finite‑sample coverage guarantees for configurations on or below this frontier and demonstrate that, when applied to augment opinion survey data with large language model responses, the method achieves the desired coverage while significantly tightening confidence intervals.
By Chengpiao Huang, Kaizheng Wang
The paper proposes a two‑stage framework that first fine‑tunes a large language model (LLM) and then rectifies its outputs, allocating limited labeled data optimally between the stages. It argues that the usual mean‑squared‑error objective for fine‑tuning misaligns with the downstream rectification, and instead suggests minimizing prediction‑error variance for mean estimation or a scalarized variance metric for general M‑estimation. Empirical results confirm that this variance‑based fine‑tuning, combined with optimal data allocation, yields significant efficiency gains over using either fine‑tuning or rectification alone, or using the conventional objective.
By Zikun Ye, Jinglong Zhao, Lei Wang
arXiv:2604. 14575v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Marketing research often relies on parameters estimated from costly human-generated data, such as conjoint survey responses, purchase decisions, and field experiment outcomes.
By Cheng Lu, Mengxin Wang, Dennis J. Zhang, Heng Zhang
arXiv:2602. 14279v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Eliciting information to reduce uncertainty about latent group-level properties from surveys and other collective assessments requires allocating limited questioning effort under real costs and missing data.
By Ruomeng Ding, Tianwei Gao, Thomas P. Zollo, Eitan Bachmat, Richard Zemel, Zhun Deng
arXiv:2511. 12309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-consistency (SC) is a widely used test-time inference technique for improving performance in chain-of-thought reasoning.
By Austin Feng, Marius Alonso, Ambroise Odonnat, Vasilii Feofanov, Ievgen Redko
arXiv:2606. 27171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work addresses the problem of variance in stochastic gradient estimation for machine learning optimization.
By Jonne Pohjankukka, Jukka Heikkonen