arXiv:2605.01868cs.LG2026-05

提出分支归一化流,提升分布偏移下条件预测的可靠性

Robust Conditional Conformal Prediction via Branched Normalizing Flow

论文配图:Robust Conditional Conformal Prediction via Branched Normalizing Flow
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 设计双分支结构,将测试样本映射到校准分布并反推预测集
  • 在9个数据集上验证,不同置信水平下条件覆盖率显著提升
  • 适合关注预测可靠性与分布偏移鲁棒性的研究者

共形预测(CP)在校准与测试分布相同假设下可提供边际覆盖保证。然而,在分布偏移下,现有方法仅对齐边际共形得分分布,虽能保持边际覆盖,却无法控制个别测试样本的条件覆盖误差,导致部分区域预测仍不可靠。本文首次从校准与测试分布间的Wasserstein距离角度,界定了分布偏移下的条件失效范围,揭示了可逆传输的关键作用。受此启发,提出分支归一化流(BNF),其双分支架构将测试输入映射至校准分布,再将该输入的预测集变换回测试分布,同时保留条件覆盖保证。实验表明,BNF在9个数据集上、多种置信水平下均显著提升条件覆盖的鲁棒性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Conformal prediction (CP) constructs prediction sets with marginal coverage guarantees under the assumption that the calibration and test distributions are identical. However, under distribution shift, existing approaches primarily align marginal conformal score distributions, which is sufficient to preserve marginal coverage but does not control the conditional coverage error at individual test inputs. As a consequence, CP can remain unreliable in regions where the conditional score distributions are mismatched. In this work, we bound the conditional invalidity of CP under distribution shift in terms of the Wasserstein distance between the calibration and test distributions. This result highlights the role of invertible transport in mitigating conditional coverage degradation. Motivated by this insight, we introduce Branched Normalizing Flow (BNF), a two-branch architecture that normalizes a test input to the calibration distribution and transforms the prediction set of the normalized input back to the test distribution while preserving conditional guarantees. Empirically, BNF consistently improves conditional coverage robustness on nine datasets across a wide range of confidence levels.

共形预测分布偏移归一化流条件覆盖

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