Papers › Sparse Activations as Conformal Predictors

Sparse Activations as Conformal Predictors

20 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.14773archive 2025-07-28

Margarida M. Campos, João Calém, Sophia Sklaviadis, Mário A. T. Figueiredo, André F. T. Martins

Conformal prediction is a distribution-free framework for uncertainty quantification that replaces point predictions with sets, offering marginal coverage guarantees (i.e., ensuring that the prediction sets contain the true label with a specified probability, in expectation). In this paper, we uncover a novel connection between conformal prediction and sparse softmax-like transformations, such as sparsemax and γ-entmax (with γ> 1), which may assign nonzero probability only to a subset of labels. We introduce new non-conformity scores for classification that make the calibration process correspond to the widely used temperature scaling method. At test time, applying these sparse transformations with the calibrated temperature leads to a support set (i.e., the set of labels with nonzero probability) that automatically inherits the coverage guarantees of conformal prediction. Through experiments on computer vision and text classification benchmarks, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in terms of coverage, efficiency, and adaptiveness compared to standard non-conformity scores based on softmax.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections