fcp
Optimizing In-Context Learning for Efficient Full Conformal Prediction
Deng, Weicao, Park, Sangwoo, Li, Min, Simeone, Osvaldo
Reliable uncertainty quantification is critical for trustworthy AI. Conformal Prediction (CP) provides prediction sets with distribution-free coverage guarantees, but its two main variants face complementary limitations. Split CP (SCP) suffers from data inefficiency due to dataset partitioning, while full CP (FCP) improves data efficiency at the cost of prohibitive retraining complexity. Recent approaches based on meta-learning or in-context learning (ICL) partially mitigate these drawbacks. However, they rely on training procedures not specifically tailored to CP, which may yield large prediction sets. We introduce an efficient FCP framework, termed enhanced ICL-based FCP (E-ICL+FCP), which employs a permutation-invariant Transformer-based ICL model trained with a CP-aware loss. By simulating the multiple retrained models required by FCP without actual retraining, E-ICL+FCP preserves coverage while markedly reducing both inefficiency and computational overhead. Experiments on synthetic and real tasks demonstrate that E-ICL+FCP attains superior efficiency-coverage trade-offs compared to existing SCP and FCP baselines.
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Greater London > London (0.04)
- Asia > China > Zhejiang Province > Hangzhou (0.04)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (0.49)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Uncertainty > Bayesian Inference (0.47)
Language Models Can Learn from Verbal Feedback Without Scalar Rewards
Luo, Renjie, Liu, Zichen, Liu, Xiangyan, Du, Chao, Lin, Min, Chen, Wenhu, Lu, Wei, Pang, Tianyu
LLMs are often trained with RL from human or AI feedback, yet such methods typically compress nuanced feedback into scalar rewards, discarding much of their richness and inducing scale imbalance. We propose treating verbal feedback as a conditioning signal. Inspired by language priors in text-to-image generation, which enable novel outputs from unseen prompts, we introduce the feedback-conditional policy (FCP). FCP learns directly from response-feedback pairs, approximating the feedback-conditional posterior through maximum likelihood training on offline data. We further develop an online bootstrapping stage where the policy generates under positive conditions and receives fresh feedback to refine itself. This reframes feedback-driven learning as conditional generation rather than reward optimization, offering a more expressive way for LLMs to directly learn from verbal feedback. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/feedback-conditional-policy.
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Large Language Model (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Chatbot (0.94)
ArrayDPS: Unsupervised Blind Speech Separation with a Diffusion Prior
Xu, Zhongweiyang, Fan, Xulin, Wang, Zhong-Qiu, Jiang, Xilin, Choudhury, Romit Roy
Blind Speech Separation (BSS) aims to separate multiple speech sources from audio mixtures recorded by a microphone array. The problem is challenging because it is a blind inverse problem, i.e., the microphone array geometry, the room impulse response (RIR), and the speech sources, are all unknown. We propose ArrayDPS to solve the BSS problem in an unsupervised, array-agnostic, and generative manner. The core idea builds on diffusion posterior sampling (DPS), but unlike DPS where the likelihood is tractable, ArrayDPS must approximate the likelihood by formulating a separate optimization problem. The solution to the optimization approximates room acoustics and the relative transfer functions between microphones. These approximations, along with the diffusion priors, iterate through the ArrayDPS sampling process and ultimately yield separated voice sources. We only need a simple single-speaker speech diffusion model as a prior along with the mixtures recorded at the microphones; no microphone array information is necessary. Evaluation results show that ArrayDPS outperforms all baseline unsupervised methods while being comparable to supervised methods in terms of SDR. Audio demos are provided at: https://arraydps.github.io/ArrayDPSDemo/.
- North America > United States > Illinois > Champaign County > Urbana (0.04)
- North America > Canada (0.04)
- Europe > Netherlands (0.04)
- Asia > China > Guangdong Province > Shenzhen (0.04)
Frenet Corridor Planner: An Optimal Local Path Planning Framework for Autonomous Driving
Tariq, Faizan M., Yeh, Zheng-Hang, Singh, Avinash, Isele, David, Bae, Sangjae
Motivated by the requirements for effectiveness and efficiency, path-speed decomposition-based trajectory planning methods have widely been adopted for autonomous driving applications. While a global route can be pre-computed offline, real-time generation of adaptive local paths remains crucial. Therefore, we present the Frenet Corridor Planner (FCP), an optimization-based local path planning strategy for autonomous driving that ensures smooth and safe navigation around obstacles. Modeling the vehicles as safety-augmented bounding boxes and pedestrians as convex hulls in the Frenet space, our approach defines a drivable corridor by determining the appropriate deviation side for static obstacles. Thereafter, a modified space-domain bicycle kinematics model enables path optimization for smoothness, boundary clearance, and dynamic obstacle risk minimization. The optimized path is then passed to a speed planner to generate the final trajectory. We validate FCP through extensive simulations and real-world hardware experiments, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.
- Asia > Middle East > Jordan (0.04)
- North America > United States > Michigan > Washtenaw County > Ann Arbor (0.04)
- North America > United States > California > Santa Clara County > San Jose (0.04)
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- Transportation > Ground > Road (1.00)
- Automobiles & Trucks (0.87)
- Information Technology > Robotics & Automation (0.69)
Flow-based Conformal Prediction for Multi-dimensional Time Series
Lee, Junghwan, Xu, Chen, Xie, Yao
Conformal prediction for time series presents two key challenges: (1) leveraging sequential correlations in features and non-conformity scores and (2) handling multi-dimensional outcomes. We propose a novel conformal prediction method to address these two key challenges by integrating Transformer and Normalizing Flow. Specifically, the Transformer encodes the historical context of time series, and normalizing flow learns the transformation from the base distribution to the distribution of non-conformity scores conditioned on the encoded historical context. This enables the construction of prediction regions by transforming samples from the base distribution using the learned conditional flow. We ensure the marginal coverage by defining the prediction regions as sets in the transformed space that correspond to a predefined probability mass in the base distribution. The model is trained end-to-end by Flow Matching, avoiding the need for computationally intensive numerical solutions of ordinary differential equations. We demonstrate that our proposed method achieves smaller prediction regions compared to the baselines while satisfying the desired coverage through comprehensive experiments using simulated and real-world time series datasets.
Transductive Conformal Inference for Ranking
Fermanian, Jean-Baptiste, Humbert, Pierre, Blanchard, Gilles
We introduce a method based on Conformal Prediction (CP) to quantify the uncertainty of full ranking algorithms. We focus on a specific scenario where $n + m$ items are to be ranked by some ''black box'' algorithm. It is assumed that the relative (ground truth) ranking of n of them is known. The objective is then to quantify the error made by the algorithm on the ranks of the m new items among the total $(n + m)$. In such a setting, the true ranks of the n original items in the total $(n + m)$ depend on the (unknown) true ranks of the m new ones. Consequently, we have no direct access to a calibration set to apply a classical CP method. To address this challenge, we propose to construct distribution-free bounds of the unknown conformity scores using recent results on the distribution of conformal p-values. Using these scores upper bounds, we provide valid prediction sets for the rank of any item. We also control the false coverage proportion, a crucial quantity when dealing with multiple prediction sets. Finally, we empirically show on both synthetic and real data the efficiency of our CP method.
- Asia > Middle East > Jordan (0.04)
- Europe > Middle East > Cyprus > Pafos > Paphos (0.04)
- Europe > France > Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur > Alpes-Maritimes > Nice (0.04)
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Building Conformal Prediction Intervals with Approximate Message Passing
Clarté, Lucas, Zdeborová, Lenka
Conformal prediction has emerged as a powerful tool for building prediction intervals that are valid in a distribution-free way. However, its evaluation may be computationally costly, especially in the high-dimensional setting where the dimensionality and sample sizes are both large and of comparable magnitudes. To address this challenge in the context of generalized linear regression, we propose a novel algorithm based on Approximate Message Passing (AMP) to accelerate the computation of prediction intervals using full conformal prediction, by approximating the computation of conformity scores. Our work bridges a gap between modern uncertainty quantification techniques and tools for high-dimensional problems involving the AMP algorithm. We evaluate our method on both synthetic and real data, and show that it produces prediction intervals that are close to the baseline methods, while being orders of magnitude faster. Additionally, in the high-dimensional limit and under assumptions on the data distribution, the conformity scores computed by AMP converge to the one computed exactly, which allows theoretical study and benchmarking of conformal methods in high dimensions.
- North America > United States > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco (0.14)
- Europe > Switzerland > Vaud > Lausanne (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Oxfordshire > Oxford (0.04)
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- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Uncertainty (0.67)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Statistical Learning > Regression (0.66)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Learning Graphical Models > Directed Networks > Bayesian Learning (0.46)
A simple and improved algorithm for noisy, convex, zeroth-order optimisation
In this paper, we study the problem of noisy, convex, zeroth order optimisation of a function $f$ over a bounded convex set $\bar{\mathcal X}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$. Given a budget $n$ of noisy queries to the function $f$ that can be allocated sequentially and adaptively, our aim is to construct an algorithm that returns a point $\hat x\in \bar{\mathcal X}$ such that $f(\hat x)$ is as small as possible. We provide a conceptually simple method inspired by the textbook center of gravity method, but adapted to the noisy and zeroth order setting. We prove that this method is such that the $f(\hat x) - \min_{x\in \bar{\mathcal X}} f(x)$ is of smaller order than $d^2/\sqrt{n}$ up to poly-logarithmic terms. We slightly improve upon existing literature, where to the best of our knowledge the best known rate is in [Lattimore, 2024] is of order $d^{2.5}/\sqrt{n}$, albeit for a more challenging problem. Our main contribution is however conceptual, as we believe that our algorithm and its analysis bring novel ideas and are significantly simpler than existing approaches.