arXiv Machine Learning By Yingjie Bai, Weiming Zhi

When Does Data Value Reduce to Class Balance? A Coverage View of Per-Point Data Valuation

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper investigates when per‑point data‑valuation scores (e.g., Data Shapley, influence, leverage) reduce to simple class balance. It shows that a fixed top‑k selection rule fails when a point’s value depends on what else has been chosen, leading to excess risk in equal latent‑mode models. The authors propose using class balance when labels reveal learner modes and explicit coverage otherwise, demonstrating that class‑balancing per‑point scores can match or outperform generic coverage on standard classification tasks with pretrained features, while label‑free coverage can improve accuracy by up to +0.20.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

The Price of Choice in Selective Prediction

arXiv:2610. 29067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A selective classifier may be claimed to satisfy a risk-coverage contract if some rule from a predeclared menu (a threshold or a union of $K$ score intervals) attains coverage at least $\kappa$ and error at most $\alpha$.

By Daniel Cie\'slak, Andrzej Czy\.zewski
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Useful to Whom? The Easy-versus-Coverage Boundary Moves with the Learner

The study investigates whether the usefulness of training samples depends on the data itself or on the learner. By fixing selected subsets and varying the learner, the authors show that the crossover point—where easy samples give way to coverage samples—shifts with changes in model width, input resolution, and architecture. This indicates that the boundary between easy and coverage samples is learner‑dependent rather than data‑dependent.

By Yangze Liu, Xiao-Long Yin, Zhongyi Han
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

When Thoughts Become Memory: Unifying In-Context Learning and Fine-Tuning

The paper presents a certified rule that determines whether unseen data should be incorporated into a pretrained model’s context or its weights, based on an exact law for their information value. This law quantifies the code length saved on held‑out queries as the expected bits stored about the query, adjusted by a prior repair and decoding loss, and applies to any model, architecture, dataset, or task. The authors demonstrate that the rule’s ceilings correctly certify choices across diverse models—including transformers, TabPFN, occupancy networks, and stereo networks—and that an anytime‑valid test can reliably select the better approach (e.g., TabPFN over XGBoost or GPT‑2’s cache over fine‑tuning) with controlled error rates.

By Leon Chlon, Julie Huang