Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.35035

Macro Mondrian Conformal Risk Control

Abstract

Conformal Risk Control (CRC) extends conformal prediction beyond the coverage setting to the control of general monotone loss functions, in a distribution-free and modelagnostic fashion. This makes it well-suited to problems with high-dimensional targets, such as the semantic segmentation task addressed in this work. However, CRC guarantees only marginal control, meaning that the risk is controlled on average over the data distribution. Under imbalanced distributions, the risk on inputs that contain rare objects may therefore remain uncontrolled, even when the marginal guarantee holds. We propose a new method that controls the risk on average over user-defined groups of the domain, drawing on Mondrian conformal prediction and macro-coverage algorithms. The method relies on a taxonomy, that is, a function that assigns a group to each data point, and reweights each point's risk by a coefficient that depends on its group probability, so that rare points contribute more than common ones. We illustrate the approach on two semantic segmentation datasets.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Julien Combes, Jean-Francois Coeurjolly, Alexandre Dervill{é}. 2026-10-26. Macro Mondrian Conformal Risk Control. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35035

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Sharp Generalization for Nonparametric Regression in Interpolation Space by Over-Parameterized Neural Networks Trained with Preconditioned Gradient Descent and Early Stopping

We study nonparametric regression using an over-parameterized two-layer neural network trained with algorithmic guarantees in this paper. We consider the setting where the training features are drawn uniformly from the unit sphere in $\RR^d$, and the target function lies in an interpolation space commonly studied in statistical learning theory. We demonstrate that training the neural network with a novel Preconditioned Gradient Descent (PGD) algorithm, equipped with early stopping, achieves a sharp regression rate of $\cO(n^{-\frac{2αs'}{2αs'+1}})$, where $α$ parametrizes the polynomial eigenvalue decay of the regular Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), $λ_j\asymp j^{-2α}$, and $2α=d/(d-1)$ under the spherical uniform design considered here. The target function is assumed to belong to the interpolation space $\bth{\cH_K}^{s'}$ with $s'\ge3$. This rate is even sharper than the currently known nearly-optimal rate of $\cO(n^{-\frac{2αs'}{2αs'+1}})\log^2(1/δ)$~\citep{Li2024-edr-general-domain}, where $n$ is the size of the training data and $δ\in (0,1)$ is a small probability. Our analysis is based on two key technical contributions. First, we present a principled decomposition of the network output at each PGD step into a function in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) of a newly induced integral kernel, and a residual function with small $L^{\infty}$-norm. Second, leveraging this decomposition, we apply local Rademacher complexity theory to tightly control the complexity of the function class comprising all the neural network functions obtained in the PGD iterates. Our results show how PGD changes the effective kernel in the reference training dynamics, inducing an integral kernel with lower complexity than the regular NTK arising from vanilla GD.

stat.ML↗

The Impact of Anisotropic Covariance Structure on the Training Dynamics and Generalization Error of Linear Networks

The success of deep neural networks largely depends on the statistical structure of the training data. While learning dynamics and generalization on isotropic data are well-established, the impact of pronounced anisotropy on these crucial aspects is not yet fully understood. We examine the impact of data anisotropy, represented by a spiked covariance structure, a canonical yet tractable model, on the learning dynamics and generalization error of a two-layer linear network in a linear regression setting. Our analysis reveals that the learning dynamics proceed in two distinct phases, governed initially by the input-output correlation and subsequently by other principal directions of the data structure. Furthermore, we derive an analytical expression for the generalization error, quantifying how the alignment of the spike structure of the data with the learning task improves performance. Our findings offer deep theoretical insights into how data anisotropy shapes the learning trajectory and final performance, providing a foundation for understanding complex interactions in more advanced network architectures.

stat.ML↗

Multi-Domain Empirical Bayes for Linearly-Mixed Causal Representations

Causal representation learning (CRL) aims to learn low-dimensional causal latent variables from high-dimensional observations. While identifiability has been extensively studied for CRL, estimation has been less explored. We use empirical Bayes (EB) to estimate causal representations from multiple domains whose differences reflect interventions in a shared causal model. Multi-domain CRL poses a simultaneous inference problem suited to EB. Here, we propose an EB $f$-modeling algorithm that improves the quality of learned causal variables by exploiting invariant structure within and across domains. Specifically, we consider linear measurement models with interventional priors induced by an acyclic latent causal model with known graph and intervention targets. We develop an EM-style algorithm based on causally structured score matching. In experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic single-cell data, our proposed method achieves more accurate estimation than alternative methods and baselines.

stat.ML↗