adaptivity
CASCADE Conformal Prediction: Uncertainty-Adaptive Prediction Intervals for Two-Stage Clinical Decision Support
Diaz-Rincon, Ricardo, Liang, Muxuan, Ramirez-Zamora, Adolfo, Shickel, Benjamin
Effective medication management in Parkinson's Disease (PD) is challenging due to heterogeneous disease progression, variable patient response, and medication side effects. While AI models can forecast levodopa equivalent daily dose (LEDD) as a measure of medication needs, standard uncertainty quantification often fails to communicate the reliability of these predictions, treating high and low confidence clinical decisions identically. We introduce CASCADE (Calibrated Adaptive Scaling via Conformal And Distributional Estimation), a novel conformal prediction framework that propagates epistemic uncertainty from a screening classifier to adapt downstream predictions. Unlike standard conformal methods that rely on auxiliary residual regression, we leverage epistemic uncertainty from a primary classification task (identifying whether a medication change is needed) to dynamically scale the prediction intervals of a secondary regression task (predicting how much change). By mapping Venn-Abers multi-probabilistic uncertainty directly to non-conformity scores, our framework achieves continuous risk adaptation. We demonstrate that this ``cascade effect'' produces highly efficient intervals for confident patients (38.9% narrower than standard conformal baselines) while automatically expanding intervals to ensure robust coverage for uncertain cases, bridging the gap between discrete clinical decision-making and continuous dose forecasting in PD.
Adaptivity Under Realizability Constraints: Comparing In-Context and Agentic Learning
Kratsios, Anastasis, Neuman, A. Martina, Petersen, Philipp
We compare in-context learning with fixed queries and agentic learning with adaptive queries for uniform approximation of task families. We consider two settings: an unrestricted regime, where querying and approximation are arbitrary functions, and a realizable regime, where we require these operations to be implemented by ReLU neural networks. In both settings, adaptivity never hinders approximation performance. However, this advantage can change when one passes from the unrestricted regime to the realizable regime. We identify four distinct approximation scenarios, each witnessed by an explicit task family: (a) no advantage of adaptivity; (b) an advantage in the unrestricted regime that persists under ReLU realizability; (c) an advantage that arises only under realizability; and (d) an advantage that disappears under realizability. This demonstrates that representational constraints interact profoundly with the effect of adaptivity.
architectures
A.1 Face experiments For the encoder, we use a resnet-50 backbone followed by projection heads that output pointwise, lower and upper quantile predictions. Each projection head consists of a convolution layer followed by a Leaky-Relu activation and a global average pooling layer. The input to each projection head is the output of the backbone network - a feature map of size 512 4 4 and the output dimension is the number of style dimensions - in the case of the pretrained FFHQ styleGAN2 used in our experiments, this value is 9088. For the generator, we use a FFHQ pretrained styleGAN2 trained to output faces of resolution 1024 1024 obtained from the official implementation. No discriminator is used during training.
Understanding the Role of Adaptivity in Machine Teaching: The Case of Version Space Learners
Yuxin Chen, Adish Singla, Oisin Mac Aodha, Pietro Perona, Yisong Yue
In real-world applications of education, an effective teacher adaptively chooses the next example to teach based on the learner's current state. However, most existing work in algorithmic machine teachingfocuses on the batch setting, where adaptivity plays no role. In this paper, we study the case of teaching consistent, version space learners in an interactive setting. At any time step, the teacher provides an example, the learner performs an update, and the teacher observes the learner'snew state.