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Cluster Frequency Conformal Prediction for Local Coverage

arXiv 2605.24872 ↗First posted 24 May 2026cs.LGcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Conformal prediction provides distribution-free coverage guarantees, but in many-class classification it may still under-cover specific classes or subpopulations, preventing safe deployment in high-stakes applications. We propose Cluster Frequency Conformal Prediction (CFCP), a plug-in framework that adapts conformal prediction to local structure in a learned representation space. CFCP clusters learned embeddings, estimates cluster-level label-frequency distributions from calibration data, and for each test point constructs a sample-specific probability vector by softly mixing nearby cluster distributions regularized with global-prior and reliability-aware shrinkage. This vector is then conformalized using standard set constructors. In the disjoint-split regime, CFCP inherits standard finite-sample marginal validity. Under additional assumptions, CFCP further admits a local-validity interpretation. Since representation clusters aggregate locally similar samples, their empirical class frequencies provide a stable estimate of local label ambiguity. Across image and text benchmarks, CFCP achieves the best class coverage in 15/16 dataset/score-family comparisons and a competitive prediction set size efficiency, with several settings substantially more efficient. Overall, our results show that cluster-frequency information provides an effective localized signal for improving classwise reliability in many-class conformal prediction.

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References · 20

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8 more
  1. 2023Conformal Prediction for Deep Classifier via Label Rankingcited by 53
  2. 2023Conformal prediction with local weights: randomization enables local guaranteescited by 48
  3. 2024Conformal Prediction for Class-wise Coverage via Augmented Label Rank Calibrationcited by 19
  4. 2023Improving Uncertainty Quantification of Deep Classifiers via Neighborhood Conformal Prediction: Novel Algorithm and Theoretical Analysiscited by 16
  5. 2024Does confidence calibration improve conformal prediction?cited by 12
  6. 2024TorchCP: A Python Library for Conformal Predictioncited by 9
  7. 2024Posterior Conformal Predictioncited by 7
  8. 2025Conformal Prediction for Long-Tailed Classificationcited by 7

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