Conformal Structured Prediction

Published: 22 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 17 May 2025ICLR 2025 PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Conformal Prediction, Structured Prediction, Integer Programming
TL;DR: We construct structured conformal prediction sets via integer programming.
Abstract: Conformal prediction has recently emerged as a promising strategy for quantifying the uncertainty of a predictive model; these algorithms modify the model to output sets of labels that are guaranteed to contain the true label with high probability. However, existing conformal prediction algorithms have largely targeted classification and regression settings, where the structure of the prediction set has a simple form as a level set of the scoring function. However, for complex structured outputs such as text generation, these prediction sets might include a large number of labels and therefore be hard for users to interpret. In this paper, we propose a general framework for conformal prediction in the structured prediction setting, that modifies existing conformal prediction algorithms to output structured prediction sets that implicitly represent sets of labels. In addition, we demonstrate how our approach can be applied in domains where the prediction sets can be represented as a set of nodes in a directed acyclic graph; for instance, for hierarchical labels such as image classification, a prediction set might be a small subset of coarse labels implicitly representing the prediction set of all their more fine-descendants. We demonstrate how our algorithm can be used to construct prediction sets that satisfy a desired coverage guarantee in several domains.
Primary Area: probabilistic methods (Bayesian methods, variational inference, sampling, UQ, etc.)
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.
Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2025/AuthorGuide.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Submission Number: 5291
Loading