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arXiv · 2412.11174

Semi-Supervised Risk Control via Prediction-Powered Inference

Bat-Sheva Einbinder·Liran Ringel·Yaniv Romano
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Abstract

The risk-controlling prediction sets (RCPS) framework is a general tool for transforming the output of any machine learning model to design a predictive rule with rigorous error rate control. The key idea behind this framework is to use labeled hold-out calibration data to tune a hyper-parameter that affects the error rate of the resulting prediction rule. However, the limitation of such a calibration scheme is that with limited hold-out data, the tuned hyper-parameter becomes noisy and leads to a prediction rule with an error rate that is often unnecessarily conservative. To overcome this sample-size barrier, we introduce a semi-supervised calibration procedure that leverages unlabeled data to rigorously tune the hyper-parameter without compromising statistical validity. Our procedure builds upon the prediction-powered inference framework, carefully tailoring it to risk-controlling tasks. We demonstrate the benefits and validity of our proposal through two real-data experiments: few-shot image classification and early time series classification.

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Bat-Sheva Einbinder, Liran Ringel, Yaniv Romano. 2024-12-15. Semi-Supervised Risk Control via Prediction-Powered Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11174

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