{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-information-theoretic-perspective-on-5","title":"An Information Theoretic Perspective on Conformal Prediction","arxiv_id":"2405.02140","date":"2024-05-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alvaro H. C. Correia","Fabio Valerio Massoli","Christos Louizos","Arash Behboodi"],"abstract":"Conformal Prediction (CP) is a distribution-free uncertainty estimation framework that constructs prediction sets guaranteed to contain the true answer with a user-specified probability. Intuitively, the size of the prediction set encodes a general notion of uncertainty, with larger sets associated with higher degrees of uncertainty. In this work, we leverage information theory to connect conformal prediction to other notions of uncertainty. More precisely, we prove three different ways to upper bound the intrinsic uncertainty, as described by the conditional entropy of the target variable given the inputs, by combining CP with information theoretical inequalities. Moreover, we demonstrate two direct and useful applications of such connection between conformal prediction and information theory: (i) more principled and effective conformal training objectives that generalize previous approaches and enable end-to-end training of machine learning models from scratch, and (ii) a natural mechanism to incorporate side information into conformal prediction. We empirically validate both applications in centralized and federated learning settings, showing our theoretical results translate to lower inefficiency (average prediction set size) for popular CP methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02140v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.02140v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"conformal-prediction","task_name":"Conformal Prediction"},{"task_slug":"federated-learning","task_name":"Federated Learning"},{"task_slug":"prediction","task_name":"Prediction"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2405.02140","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2405.02140"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/Qualcomm-AI-research/info_cp","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"found_in_text":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"19f20df96ca64f53","entry":"compute_logits_dataloader_with_side_information","repo":"Qualcomm-AI-research/info_cp","repo_kind":"found_in_text","path":"scripts/side_information.py","file_url":"https://github.com/Qualcomm-AI-research/info_cp/blob/HEAD/scripts/side_information.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"BSD-3-Clause-Clear","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"19f20df96ca64f53"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}