auditor
Multicalibration Boosting: Theory, Convergence, and Transferability
Multicalibration extends classical calibration by requiring predictions to be unbiased over a rich collection of functions, encompassing both prediction slices and subpopulations. It has emerged as a powerful framework for fairness, robustness, and reliable prediction, yet the theoretical understanding of multicalibration boosting (MCBoost) remains fragmented and often relies on restrictive assumptions. In this work, we develop a unified and refined perspective on MCBoost that subsumes existing variants, including multiaccuracy, BatchGCP, and BatchMVP. We uncover several phenomena that provide new insights into its practical behavior: even highly accurate and flexible predictors can remain substantially miscalibrated; enforcing multicalibration introduces a calibration-risk trade-off; and early stopping plays a central role in controlling this trade-off. On the theoretical side, we establish a general framework for MCBoost under weaker and more realistic conditions. We show that the boosting iterates converge to a Bregman projection of the population-optimal predictor onto the cumulative span generated by the audit class, thereby explicitly characterizing the function space on which multicalibration is achieved. We further derive convergence rates under different smoothness assumptions, finite-sample guarantees, and principled stopping rules that ensure multicalibration at termination. Finally, we extend the theory of universal adaptability under covariate shift, providing more general transfer guarantees and clarifying when multicalibrated predictors generalize across domains. These results provide a more complete theoretical foundation and practical guidance for multicalibration boosting, positioning it as both a unifying framework and a reliable post-processing approach for modern predictive models.
Adaptive auditing of AI systems with anytime-valid guarantees
Zhou, Siyu, Vossler, Patrick, Sivaraman, Venkatesh, Mai, Yifan, Feng, Jean
A major bottleneck in characterizing the failure modes of generative AI systems is the cost and time of annotation and evaluation. Consequently, adaptive testing paradigms have gained popularity, where one opportunistically decides which cases and how many to annotate based on past results. While this framework is highly practical, its extreme flexibility makes it difficult to draw statistically rigorous conclusions, as it violates classical assumptions: the number of observations is typically limited (often 10 to 50 cases) and decisions regarding sampling and stopping are made in the midst of data collection rather than based a pre-specified rule. To characterize what statistical inferences can be drawn from highly adaptive audits, we introduce a hypothesis testing framework from two 'dueling' perspectives: (i) the model's null that asserts there is no failure mode with performance below a target threshold versus (ii) the auditor's null that asserts they have a sampling strategy that will uncover a failure mode. Leveraging Safe Anytime-Valid Inference (SAVI), we formalize the auditor as conducting 'testing by betting', which translates into simultaneous e-processes for testing the dueling null hypotheses. Furthermore, if the auditor is sufficiently powerful, we prove that these two hypotheses are asymptotically inverses of each other, in that passage of a stringent audit does in fact certify the AI system as being globally robust. Empirically, we demonstrate that our proposed testing procedures maintain anytime-valid type-I error control, outperform pre-specified testing methods, and can reach statistically rigorous conclusions sometimes with as few as 20 observations.
Appendix AToy example
In this section, we provide and expand upon a toy example. Recall that the inputs x and x0 need not correspond to real users but could instead represent hypothetical users. Example 5. Suppose that the regulatory guideline requires that users in the same geographical location receive similar weather forecasts. This can be written as "the weather forecasts that are selected by F should be similar for all users in the same geographical location", and S could be a randomly generated set of user pairs, where each pair corresponds to two (hypothetical) users in the same geographical location, and S could contain pairs across many locations. In the left-most panel, a filtering algorithm F takes in counterfactual inputs x and x0 and produces the content Z and Z0. Because a counterfactual regulation requires that F behave similarly under x and x0, the regulation is effectively requiring that content Z and Z0 are sufficiently similar (or, graphically, that they are close in Z). The question of how to quantify "similarity" is addressed in Section 2.1. The toy example in Example 5 is illustrated in the right-most panel.
Regulating algorithmic filtering on social media
By filtering the content that users see, social media platforms have the ability to influence users' perceptions and decisions, from their dining choices to their voting preferences. This influence has drawn scrutiny, with many calling for regulations on filtering algorithms, but designing and enforcing regulations remains challenging. In this work, we examine three questions. First, given a regulation, how would one design an audit to enforce it? Second, does the audit impose a performance cost on the platform?
Sequential Audit Sampling with Statistical Guarantees
Financial statement auditing is conducted under a risk-based evidence approach to obtain reasonable assurance. In practice, auditors often perform additional sampling or related procedures when an initial sample does not provide a sufficient basis for a conclusion. Across jurisdictions, current standards and practice manuals acknowledge such extensions, while the statistical design of sequential audit procedures has not been fully explored. This study formulates audit sampling with additional, sequentially collected items as a sequential testing problem for a finite population under sampling without replacement. We define null and alternative hypotheses in terms of a tolerable deviation rate, specify stopping and decision rules, and formulate exact sequential boundary conditions in terms of finite-population error probabilities. For practical implementation, we calibrate those boundaries by Monte Carlo simulation at least-favorable deviation rates. The exact design yields ex ante control of decision error probabilities, and the simulation-based implementation approximates that design while allowing the computation of expected stopping times. The framework is most naturally suited to attribute auditing and deviation-rate auditing, especially tests of controls, and it can be extended to one-sided, two-stage, and truncated designs.
Optimistic Verifiable Training by Controlling Hardware Nondeterminism
The increasing compute demands of AI systems has led to the emergence of services that train models on behalf of clients lacking necessary resources. However, ensuring correctness of training and guarding against potential training-time attacks, such as data poisoning and backdoors, poses challenges. Existing works on verifiable training largely fall into two classes: proof-based systems, which can be difficult to scale, and ``optimistic'' methods that consider a trusted third-party auditor who replicates the training process. A key challenge with the latter is that hardware nondeterminism between GPU types during training prevents an auditor from replicating the training process exactly, and such schemes are therefore non-robust. We propose a method that combines training in a higher precision than the target model, rounding after intermediate computation steps, and storing rounding decisions based on an adaptive thresholding procedure, to successfully control for nondeterminism. Across three different NVIDIA GPUs (A40, Titan XP, RTX 2080 Ti), we achieve exact training replication at FP32 precision for both full-training and fine-tuning of ResNet-50 (23M) and GPT-2 (117M) models. Our verifiable training scheme significantly decreases the storage and time costs compared to proof-based systems.