Selection-Safe Conformal Early Exit: Distribution-Free Coverage under Adaptive Depth
Calibrating a conformal prediction set at each early exit does not preserve coverage once a data-dependent exit is selected. We construct one terminal path score from prefix maxima, calibrate a single split-conformal quantile, and return nested prefix sets that all contain the valid terminal set. The guarantee is selection-safe without an alpha/L correction and holds simultaneously for every post-calibration label-free stopping policy that preserves terminal-set containment. We also bound the efficiency cost of the path maximum by the empirical tail of the early-over-terminal score excess. Across eight encoder task-backbone cells, pathwise selection attains macro coverage 0.901 versus 0.8...
| Authors | Adria Binte Habib, Ibne Farabi Shihab |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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