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 exchangeability


Full Conformal Prediction under Stochastic Non-Conformity Measure

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The theory of full conformal prediction uses deterministic non-conformity measure, but modern usage of full conformal prediction often relies on machine learning training, making stochasticity inevitable. A simple sufficient condition of almost sure permutation invariance of the non-conformity measure can be too restrictive, so many have suggested the relaxation to permutation in distribution as a condition for full conformal prediction validity. We, however, show that this commonly known condition is actually insufficient. We then provide a correct sufficient condition: Conditional Independence & Permutation Invariance in Distribution, which encompasses several stochastic settings that may be used in machine learning.


Betting on Moments: Legendre Jumper Martingales for Online Exchangeability Testing

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present a family of conformal test martingales based on shifted Legendre polynomials, which extends the Simple Jumper martingale. The Simple Legendre Jumper substitutes the linear betting function with a polynomial of arbitrary degree, thereby facilitating the detection of variance, skewness, and higher-order deviations from uniformity; the standard Simple Jumper is a specific instance of degree one. The Product Legendre Jumper integrates multiple polynomial degrees into a unified betting function, although its state space expands exponentially--a cost we refer to as the jumping tax. To address this issue, we introduce the Variational Legendre Jumper, which factorises the joint adaptation through a mean-field approximation, thereby reducing exponential scaling to linear time with minimal loss in power. Lastly, the Composite Legendre Jumper incorporates several jumping rates, ensuring a wealth floor under exchangeability and automatic adaptation to the shift's timescale. Empirical results from a real-world classification task demonstrate that the combined methods consistently surpass any single-degree martingale under distributional shift, and the composite variant is recommended as the default when the shift timescale is unknown.


Conformal Prediction Beyond the Horizon: Distribution-Free Inference for Policy Evaluation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reliable uncertainty quantification is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-stakes settings. We propose a unified conformal prediction framework for infinite-horizon policy evaluation that constructs distribution-free prediction intervals for returns in both on-policy and off-policy settings.


Conformal Prediction for Dyadic Regression Under Complex Missingness

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We develop a framework for conformal prediction in dyadic regression problems under complex missingness mechanisms. At the theoretical level, we develop general technical tools for establishing finite-sample validity of conformal prediction under distributional invariance conditions weaker than exchangeability. A key result handles the case where the sample itself is a random subset of the index set, a setting not covered by existing theory, via a novel bijection argument that constructs an explicit measure-preserving correspondence between events. In addition, we propose conformal prediction procedures for jointly exchangeable arrays, including full conformal, split conformal, a row-column approach exploiting similarities within rows and columns, and a selective conformal procedure achieving mask-conditional validity. For missing elements, we establish asymptotic validity of a weighted conformal procedure under a nonparametric graphon model for the missingness mechanism. We further establish conditional validity results for both continuous and discrete responses; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first formal proof of asymptotic conditional validity for weighted conformal prediction under a missing-not-at-random assumption. The proposed methods are illustrated on synthetic and real network data.


Bounded Difference Concentration for Infinitely Exchangeable Sequences with Applications to AI Benchmark Uncertainty

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the concentration properties of functions of infinitely exchangeable random variables. By conditioning on the de Finetti directing measure, we show that the deviation of any function with bounded-difference constants $c_1, \dots, c_n$ decomposes into a conditional sampling fluctuation and a latent mixture fluctuation. When this latent mixture is $ฯƒ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$-subgaussian, we establish a concentration inequality with an effective variance proxy of $\frac{1}{4}\sum_i c_i^2 + ฯƒ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$. Crucially, we demonstrate that for zero-sum linear contrasts, such as the difference between a subsample mean and a full population mean, the latent mixture term cancels exactly. This cancellation yields a tight, mixture-free Hoeffding-type bound that provides a direct de Finetti mechanism for the infinite-extendibility limit of recent finite-exchangeable concentration results. We apply this framework to quantify uncertainty in composite AI benchmarks, such as MMLU, where question items naturally exhibit exchangeable dependence across domains. Our results provide both a domain-stratified hierarchical model for bounding the uncertainty of accuracy scores, and a distribution-free, cost-saving statistical guarantee for accurately estimating full benchmark scores from random subsets.


Conformal Prediction Intervals with Tail-Specific Guarantees

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper extends classical conformal frameworks for constructing prediction intervals with global marginal coverage $1-ฮฑ$ to intervals that provide explicitly calibrated guarantees for the upper and lower tails separately. Focusing on split conformal prediction, we first construct lower and upper one-sided conformal intervals that achieve marginal validity, and then derive the induced two-sided interval by intersection. Theoretical results prove both tail-specific and global marginal coverage of the induced two-sided interval. Results are presented first for the exchangeable setting, where coverage has finite-sample guarantees, and then for non-exchangeable data, where guarantees are asymptotic. Simulation studies show that the proposed approach achieves improved directional calibration relative to classical two-sided intervals, especially relevant in skewed data. Finally, the benefit of the proposed framework is showcased in a financial application, where one aims for return maximization while seeking strict control on the left tail.


Leave a Window Out: Modifying the Jackknife for Predictive Inference in Time Series

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Conformal prediction methods enjoy strong theoretical and empirical predictive inference performance, provided the data is exchangeable, and predictors are trained in a memoryless fashion. However, these assumptions and constraints are impractical in many real-data settings, such as time series (where temporal dependence violates exchangeability, and where memoryless predictors will inevitably have poor predictive accuracy). Recent work shows that the split conformal prediction method is robust to these issues of memory-based predictors and deviations from exchangeability that are common features of time-series data. However, since using sample splitting can lead to lower accuracy, this motivates asking whether other predictive inference methods (that do not rely on data splitting) could also be reliably used in the time series setting. In this work, we show that the vanilla leave-one-out jackknife can suffer an arbitrary loss of coverage even in canonical time series models with mild temporal dependence. As a remedy, we propose a careful modification tailored to such settings, which we term the \emph{leave-a-window-out} (LWO) method, and show that it can achieve valid coverage provided that the model-fitting procedure satisfies mild stability properties. Our proofs are based on quantifying the degree to which the data departs from \emph{cyclic exchangeability}, and we introduce new coefficients to measure the extent of this departure. Experiments on time series data demonstrate that our LWO method often enjoys valid coverage when the vanilla jackknife fails to cover, while producing much narrower intervals than split conformal prediction.


Structure-Adaptive Conformal Inference for Large-Scale Out-of-Distribution Testing

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper addresses structured out-of-distribution (OOD) testing in high-stakes machine learning applications. Traditional conformal methods rely on joint exchangeability, making it difficult to incorporate auxiliary information such as spatiotemporal or grouping structures. To overcome this limitation, we propose the structure-adaptive conformal q-value (SCQ), a significance index that integrates individual test evidence with structural patterns. We also develop pseudo-score-guided transductive automated model selection (P-TAMS), which adapts conformalized model selection to structured OOD testing across a toolbox of candidate models. Together, SCQ and P-TAMS form a unified framework under pairwise exchangeability, providing finite-sample error-rate control, improved power, and enhanced interpretability. Experiments on simulated and real data demonstrate that the proposed approach controls the false discovery rate and performs well across diverse settings.


Conditional Predictive Inference for General Structured Data with Group Symmetries

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study distribution-free predictive inference for data with group symmetries, aiming to establish near-conditional coverage guarantees beyond exchangeability for structured data. While many predictive inference methods achieve a target coverage level, most provide marginal coverage. In practice, conditional predictive inference is often preferred, as it quantifies uncertainty for black-box predictions given observed attributes, thereby accommodating heterogeneity. Although many efforts have pursued efficient conditional coverage, existing methods rely on the i.i.d. or exchangeable assumption, often violated in structured settings such as networks, clusters, and imaging data. Recently, SymmPI introduced a unified approach to predictive inference under group symmetries beyond exchangeability; nevertheless, its guarantees remain marginal and do not account for population heterogeneity. To bridge this gap, we introduce C-SymmPI, a framework that achieves near-conditional coverage under general data structures with group symmetries, extending beyond exchangeability to cover networks, cluster-level data, and related structures. Inspired by relaxed multi-accuracy, our approach reformulates conditional coverage as miscoverage error over a user-specified function class. We establish theoretical guarantees under distributional invariance and distribution shift, and derive convergence rates for linear and RKHS function classes, recovering state-of-the-art results in the exchangeable setting as special cases. For computational efficiency, we develop two variants: a projection-based algorithm for high-dimensional observations, and a sampling-based algorithm for large or infinite groups. We demonstrate effectiveness on hierarchical and network data. Empirical results show that C-SymmPI delivers more informative and stable conditional coverage with improved accuracy compared to existing methods.