hoeffding
Conformal Risk Control under Non-Monotone Losses: Theory and Finite-Sample Guarantees
Aldirawi, Tareq, Li, Yun, Guo, Wenge
Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees for controlling the expected loss at a user-specified level. Existing theory typically assumes that the loss decreases monotonically with a tuning parameter that governs the size of the prediction set. However, this assumption is often violated in practice, where losses may behave non-monotonically due to competing objectives such as coverage and efficiency. In this paper, we study CRC under non-monotone loss functions when the tuning parameter is selected from a finite grid, a setting commonly arising in thresholding and discretized decision rules. Revisiting a known counterexample, we show that the validity of CRC without monotonicity depends critically on the relationship between the calibration sample size and the grid resolution. In particular, reliable risk control can still be achieved when the calibration sample is sufficiently large relative to the grid size. We establish a finite-sample guarantee for bounded losses over a grid of size $m$, showing that the excess risk above the target level $α$ scales on the order of $\sqrt{\log(m)/n}$, where $n$ is the calibration sample size. A matching lower bound demonstrates that this rate is minimax optimal. We also derive refined guarantees under additional structural conditions, including Lipschitz continuity and monotonicity, and extend the analysis to settings with distribution shift via importance weighting. Numerical experiments on synthetic multilabel classification and real object detection data illustrate the practical implications of non-monotonicity. Methods that explicitly account for finite-sample uncertainty achieve more stable risk control than approaches based on monotonicity transformations, while maintaining competitive prediction set sizes.
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Theoretical Foundations of Latent Posterior Factors: Formal Guarantees for Multi-Evidence Reasoning
We present a complete theoretical characterization of Latent Posterior Factors (LPF), a principled framework for aggregating multiple heterogeneous evidence items in probabilistic prediction tasks. Multi-evidence reasoning arises pervasively in high-stakes domains including healthcare diagnosis, financial risk assessment, legal case analysis, and regulatory compliance, yet existing approaches either lack formal guarantees or fail to handle multi-evidence scenarios architecturally. LPF encodes each evidence item into a Gaussian latent posterior via a variational autoencoder, converting posteriors to soft factors through Monte Carlo marginalization, and aggregating factors via exact Sum-Product Network inference (LPF-SPN) or a learned neural aggregator (LPF-Learned). We prove seven formal guarantees spanning the key desiderata for trustworthy AI: Calibration Preservation (ECE <= epsilon + C/sqrt(K_eff)); Monte Carlo Error decaying as O(1/sqrt(M)); a non-vacuous PAC-Bayes bound with train-test gap of 0.0085 at N=4200; operation within 1.12x of the information-theoretic lower bound; graceful degradation as O(epsilon*delta*sqrt(K)) under corruption, maintaining 88% performance with half of evidence adversarially replaced; O(1/sqrt(K)) calibration decay with R^2=0.849; and exact epistemic-aleatoric uncertainty decomposition with error below 0.002%. All theorems are empirically validated on controlled datasets spanning up to 4,200 training examples. Our theoretical framework establishes LPF as a foundation for trustworthy multi-evidence AI in safety-critical applications.
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- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks (0.66)
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bc6d753857fe3dd4275dff707dedf329-Supplemental.pdf
In this setting, unlike basic setting, objective and constraints are not linear. We focus on a single state-action pairs,a, stage h, and objectivem. Similarly, in constrained settings, its estimated resource consumptions are underestimates of the true resource consumptions. B.5 BoundingtheBellmanerror We now provide an upper bound on the Bellman error which arises in the RHS of the regret decomposition(Proposition3.3). When neither failure events occur (probability 1 2δ), Proposition 3.3 upper bounds either of reward or consumption regret by In this section, we prove the main guarantee for the convex-concave setting.