# Adaptive Conformal Guidance for Learning under Uncertainty

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16736 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16736/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [A Gentle Introduction to Conformal Prediction and Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07511/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [Conformal Prediction Under Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06019/) (2019)
- [Behavioral Cloning from Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01954/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Conformal Inference Under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00170/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty Sets for Image Classifiers using Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14193/) (2020)
- [Minigrid & Miniworld: Modular & Customizable Reinforcement Learning Environments for Goal-Oriented Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13831/) (2023)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Representations with Probabilistic Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10837/) (2018)
- [MiniLLM: On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08543/) (2023)
- [Logit Standardization in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01427/) (2024)
- [Imitation Bootstrapped Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02198/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Task Assignment Under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21554/) (2026)
- [Align Then Reason: A Multimodal Lip-Sync Judge for Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning with guidance has proven effective across a wide range of machine learning systems. Guidance may, for example, come from annotated datasets in supervised learning, pseudo-labels in semi-supervised learning, and expert demonstration policies in reinforcement learning. However, guidance signals can be noisy due to domain shifts and limited data availability and may not generalize well. Blindly trusting such signals when they are noisy, incomplete, or misaligned with the target domain can lead to degraded performance. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Conformal Guidance (AdaConG), a simple yet effective approach that dynamically modulates the influence of guidance signals based on their associated uncertainty, quantified via split conformal prediction (CP). By adaptively adjusting to guidance uncertainty, AdaConG enables models to reduce reliance on potentially misleading signals and enhance learning performance. We validate AdaConG across diverse tasks, including knowledge distillation, semi-supervised image classification, gridworld navigation, and autonomous driving. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaConG improves performance and robustness under imperfect guidance, e.g., in gridworld navigation, it accelerates convergence and achieves over 6× higher rewards than the best-performing baseline. These results highlight AdaConG as a broadly applicable solution for learning under uncertainty.