Local Ai
Certify or Refuse: A Cross-Model Map for Selective Risk Control with Coverage Floors under Covariate Shift
arXiv:2608.10893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Certified selective predictors attain whatever coverage they attain; operators impose an automation floor: answer at least a eta-fraction of shifted tar
arXiv:2608.10893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Certified selective predictors attain whatever coverage they attain; operators impose an automation floor: answer at least a eta-fraction of shifted target traffic with at most an alpha-fraction of answers wrong. Under bounded-ratio covariate shift we prove the Floor Certification Map: once that floor must be certified alongside the selection-conditioned risk alpha, certification acquires a feasibility frontier and a two-resource complexity map, additive up to constants: risk in labeled source, the floor in unlabeled target samples. The rates are local, needing a regular frontier margin, slack below the local-regime threshold, and lattice conditions: pre-registered with a lattice margin for the upper bounds, compatible per-slack for the lower. The displayed split is the operational route; oracle weights also allow a labeled-source floor estimate. Three model-tagged results: a lower bound (Model-B), a matching oracle-weight upper bound (Model-A), and an implementable upper bound (Model-B') valid under a pre-registered exact stratified-shift model with nuisance cost priced explicitly. The match is across these models rather than a single-model minimax theorem, and necessarily so: over the full bounded-ratio class no unknown-weight procedure matches at any sample size (Model-B is inconsistent, witnessed at alpha=eta=1/2). The nuisance's necessity is only partially settled. Complexity tracks a localized accepted-region functional, not global effective sample size (ESS), on both sides, though a fixed-ESS separation theorem is left open; both lower-bound axes vanish as etao0, so the floor creates the map. Empirically, the registered bite family diverges with log-log slope -2.002 within its pre-registered band; a 1,024-cell audit records 0 violations where the formal certificates fire; and a single-corpus SQuAD-to-NewsQA feasibility audit returns honest refusal.
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Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-12