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Conformal Bayes for Two-Sided Censored Gaussian Regression under Label Shift

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Prediction under label shift becomes nonstandard when responses are censored. In a two-sided censored Gaussian model, latent values below $L$ and above $U$ are recorded at the boundary values, so the observed predictive distribution is mixed, with atoms at $L$ and $U$ and a continuous density on $(L,U)$. In this paper we develop conformal Bayes for this mixed-space setting by combining posterior predictive tilting with weighted conformal calibration. Under a two-sided Tobit Gaussian Bayesian prediction head with a Laplace posterior approximation, the tilted predictive distribution has left-atom, interior, and right-atom components, with a three-term closed-form normalizer. The resulting prediction set is a mixed highest density region that can combine boundary atoms with an interior interval and can reduce to atom-only sets under strong censoring. The main technical issue is that latent label shift does not directly give an ordinary density ratio on the observed censored scale. A latent exponential tilt induces tail-averaged atom weights at the censored boundaries, while the interior ratio remains density based. This yields a mixed observed-space calibration weight with two atom ratios and one interior density ratio. The weight corrects the calibration measure, while predictive tilting gives target-adapted mixed-HDR geometry. Synthetic experiments show that weighted tilted conformal Bayes restores marginal coverage with smaller sets than weighted source-score calibration, while revealing a trade-off between marginal coverage and component-wise behavior across atoms and interior observations.


TILT: Target-induced loss tilting under covariate shift

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce and analyze Target-Induced Loss Tilting (TILT) for unsupervised domain adaptation under covariate shift. It is based on a novel objective function that decomposes the source predictor as $f+b$, fits $f+b$ on labeled source data while simultaneously penalizing the auxiliary component $b$ on unlabeled target inputs. The resulting fit $f$ is deployed as the final target predictor. At the population level, we show that this target-side penalty implicitly induces relative importance weighting at the population level, but in terms of an estimand $b^*_f$ that is self-localized to the current error, and remains uniformly bounded for any source-target pair (even those with disjoint supports). We prove a general finite-sample oracle inequality on the excess risk, and use it to give an end-to-end guarantee for training with sparse ReLU networks. Experiments on controlled regression problems and shifted CIFAR-100 distillation show that TILT improves target-domain performance over source-only training, exact importance weighting, and relative density-ratio baselines, with a stable dependence on the regularization parameter.



Unbounded Density Ratio Estimation and Its Application to Covariate Shift Adaptation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper focuses on the problem of unbounded density ratio estimation -- an understudied yet critical challenge in statistical learning -- and its application to covariate shift adaptation. Much of the existing literature assumes that the density ratio is either uniformly bounded or unbounded but known exactly. These conditions are often violated in practice, creating a gap between theoretical guarantees and real-world applicability. In contrast, this work directly addresses unbounded density ratios and integrates them into importance weighting for effective covariate shift adaptation. We propose a three-step estimation method that leverages unlabeled data from both the source and target distributions: (1) estimating a relative density ratio; (2) applying a truncation operation to control its unboundedness; and (3) transforming the truncated estimate back into the standard density ratio. The estimated density ratio is then employed as importance weights for regression under covariate shift. We establish rigorous, non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for both the proposed density ratio estimator and the resulting regression function estimator, demonstrating optimal or near-optimal convergence rates. Our findings offer new theoretical insights into density ratio estimation and learning under covariate shift, extending classical learning theory to more practical and challenging scenarios.


Learning Cortico-Muscular Dependence through Orthonormal Decomposition of Density Ratios

Neural Information Processing Systems

The cortico-spinal neural pathway is fundamental for motor control and movement execution, and in humans it is typically studied using concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) recordings. However, current approaches for capturing high-level and contextual connectivity between these recordings have important limitations. Here, we present a novel application of statistical dependence estimators based on orthonormal decomposition of density ratios to model the relationship between cortical and muscle oscillations. Our method extends from traditional scalar-valued measures by learning eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, and projection spaces of density ratios from realizations of the signal, addressing the interpretability, scalability, and local temporal dependence of cortico-muscular connectivity. We experimentally demonstrate that eigenfunctions learned from cortico-muscular connectivity can accurately classify movements and subjects. Moreover, they reveal channel and temporal dependencies that confirm the activation of specific EEG channels during movement.


Revealing Distribution Discrepancy by Sampling Transfer in Unlabeled Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

There are increasing cases where the class labels of test samples are unavailable, creating a significant need and challenge in measuring the discrepancy between training and test distributions. This distribution discrepancy complicates the assessment of whether the hypothesis selected by an algorithm on training samples remains applicable to test samples. We present a novel approach called Importance Divergence (I-Div) to address the challenge of test label unavailability, enabling distribution discrepancy evaluation using only training samples. I-Div transfers the sampling patterns from the test distribution to the training distribution by estimating density and likelihood ratios. Specifically, the density ratio, informed by the selected hypothesis, is obtained by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the actual and estimated input distributions. Simultaneously, the likelihood ratio is adjusted according to the density ratio by reducing the generalization error of the distribution discrepancy as transformed through the two ratios. Experimentally, I-Div accurately quantifies the distribution discrepancy, as evidenced by a wide range of complex data scenarios and tasks.


Learning Cortico-Muscular Dependence through Orthonormal Decomposition of Density Ratios

Neural Information Processing Systems

The cortico-spinal neural pathway is fundamental for motor control and movement execution, and in humans it is typically studied using concurrent electroen-cephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) recordings.




Revealing Distribution Discrepancy by Sampling Transfer in Unlabeled Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

The assumption that data are independently and identically distributed (IID) is staple in statistical machine learning. It suggests that a hypothesis selected by an algorithm, after observing several training samples, should perform effectively on test samples from the same unknown distribution.