REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 31 references
Efficient Conformal Prediction for Regression Models under Label Noise
T0 review · 3 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-04 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read A deconvolution identity lets conformal prediction recover near-oracle confidence intervals even when the calibration labels are corrupted by Gaussian noise.
desk verdict A practical deconvolution method for regression CP with noisy labels that works when the noise is homoscedastic and independent of X; the coverage is conditional on that assumption, which is plausible but unvalidated in the motivating medical setting. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is the deconvolution identity of Equation (2): M_q^n = M_q^c * k, where M_q^c(ℓ, y) = P(ℓ ∈ C_q(X) | Y = y) p_Y(y) and k is the noise kernel. Because the clean coverage probability is the trace of M_q^c, the algorithm reconstructs M_q^c from the noisy-calibration empirical M_q^n by convex deconvolution, then shrinks the threshold q until the estimated clean coverage drops to 1−α.
What would settle it
Construct a regression dataset where the label noise variance is a function of X (e.g., high noise only for out-of-distribution or low-quality inputs), run the method with a constant σ, and check whether the empirical coverage on clean test labels drops below 1−α; if it does, the independence assumption has been violated.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The paper establishes that the joint distribution M_q^n(ℓ, ỹ) = P(ℓ ∈ C_q(X) | Ỹ = ỹ) p_Ỹ(ỹ) computed from noisy labels is the convolution of the corresponding clean-label distribution M_q^c(ℓ, y) with the label-noise kernel k(·; σ²). This identity lets the clean coverage probability P(Y ∈ C_q(X)) be recovered by deconvolving M_q^n along the label axis and integrating its diagonal, without ever seeing clean calibration labels. The practical algorithm discretizes the label range, solves a convex deconvolution for each bin, and searches for the largest q whose estimated clean coverage still exceeds 1−α; the result is a threshold close to the oracle clean-label threshold, producing short interv
Load-bearing premise
The entire recovery relies on the assumption that, given the true label, the noisy label is independent of the input X; if mislabeling is more likely for certain images, the deconvolution identity no longer holds and the corrected threshold has no validity.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- A practitioner who knows or can estimate the noise kernel can calibrate a conformal regressor on noisy labels and get intervals essentially as short as if the calibration set were clean.
- The method's coverage remains close to the nominal 1−α even when the assumed noise variance is moderately misspecified; overestimating σ makes intervals slightly smaller and underestimating makes them slightly larger.
- When label noise is present in both training and calibration, the threshold can still be corrected using an estimated noise level, and the empirical estimator finds that level well in the tested settings.
- The approach transfers the standard classification-side idea of noise-robust CP to continuous labels, where the main obstacle is the infinite label space and the solution is binning plus per-bin deconvolution.
Reading between the lines
- Editorial extension: if label noise depends on the input (e.g., ambiguous images are mislabeled more often), Assumption A.1 fails and the deconvolved threshold will not be calibrated; a natural fix would be to model the noise scale as a function of X and deconvolve conditional on X.
- Editorial extension: the noise-variance estimator in Section 3.3 relies on the existence of easy samples with near-zero aleatoric variance; on datasets where every sample has substantial irreducible uncertainty, the estimator will overestimate σ and produce slightly short intervals.
- Editorial extension: the same deconvolution framework should extend to non-Gaussian noise kernels (e.g., Laplace or heteroscedastic Gaussian) as long as the kernel is known, since Equation (2) only requires a translation-invariant kernel.
- Editorial extension: the iterative threshold search can be replaced by a one-step quantile estimate on the deconvolved score distribution, which may yield improved finite-sample stability; the paper does not explore this.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes a conformal prediction (CP) method for regression when the calibration labels are noisy. Under Assumptions A.1 (conditional independence of X and the noisy label given the clean label) and A.2 (Gaussian additive noise), it derives a convolution identity (Eq. (2)) relating the noisy-label joint score distribution M_n^q to the clean-label distribution M_c^q. Algorithm 1 exploits this identity: starting from the noisy CP threshold, it iteratively decreases q, estimates M_n^q from noisy calibration data, deconvolves to recover M_c^q, and estimates the clean-label coverage as the trace of M_c^q. The practical implementation discretizes the label space, solves a regularized least-squares deconvolution, and estimates the noise variance via the smallest 1% of model predictive variances. Experiments on two medical imaging datasets (Chest X-Ray and BoneAge) with synthetic Gaussian label noise show that the method achieves coverage and interval lengths close to the oracle clean-label CP and clearly outperforms the 'noisy CP' baseline.
Significance. If the method works as claimed, it addresses a genuine gap: extending conformal prediction to regression with noisy labels, where the existing baseline (noisy CP) is valid but inefficient. The convolution identity in Eq. (2) is clean and provides a principled population-level account of how label noise inflates the CP threshold. The paper includes an oracle baseline, a noisy baseline, and a sensitivity analysis over the noise variance. However, the contribution is conditional on strong assumptions, and the practical algorithm has no finite-sample coverage guarantee. The experiments only consider homoscedastic Gaussian noise added independently of the input, which sidesteps the most likely failure mode in the motivating medical-imaging setting. Thus the significance is moderate: it is a useful proof-of-concept with a sound population-level derivation, but it is not yet a robust CP method with the usual coverage guarantees.
major comments (3)
- [§3.1, Eq. (2)] Assumption A.1 is load-bearing: the fourth equality in (2) drops the conditioning on X. If the label-noise mechanism is instance-dependent (e.g., ambiguous scans are mislabeled more often), M_n^q is not the convolution of M_c^q with the homoscedastic kernel k(·;σ^2), and the deconvolved threshold is not the clean-label threshold. All experiments use synthetic Gaussian noise added independently of X, so the central claim is validated only under exactly the assumption that is most questionable in the motivating medical-imaging setting. Please either relax/robustify the method or clearly scope the claim and include experiments with X-dependent noise to assess the failure mode.
- [§3.3, Table 1] The estimator for σ^2 relies on the heuristic existence of 'easy' samples with u^2≈0. When this fails, σ is overestimated, and Table 1 shows that overestimating σ from 0.2 to 0.25 lowers coverage on Chest X-Ray to 88.52% (below the 90% target). Since the algorithm's stopping rule uses σ as an input, this is not a benign tuning issue. The paper should either provide a principled estimator, quantify sensitivity across datasets, or explicitly state the easy-sample condition and verify it in the experiments.
- [§3.2, Algorithm 1] The practical procedure has no finite-sample coverage guarantee. Steps involve binning with δ_y=0.01, masking empty bins, L2 regularization with λ=0.01, and stopping based on an estimated coverage P ℓ M^c_q[ℓ,ℓ] δ_y. None of the approximation errors are controlled, so the method can under-cover for finite n (as in Table 1). This is a departure from the usual CP guarantee, and the paper should state this limitation explicitly, e.g., by calling the target 'approximate coverage' or providing an error analysis for the discretized deconvolution.
minor comments (5)
- [§3.2] The notation ℓ and ˜y is used both for continuous values and for discretized bin indices; this should be clarified to avoid confusion with the population-level definitions in Eq. (2).
- [Algorithm 1] Step 1 says 'For ℓ,˜y ∈ Y' but the algorithm operates on discretized bins; please make the discretization explicit in the pseudocode.
- [§4.1, Table 1] The statement 'vice versa for a larger σ' is a trend rather than a strict monotonic relation in Table 1 (e.g., BoneAge with σ=0.25 has smaller length but also slightly lower coverage than the oracle). Consider phrasing it as a general trend.
- [References] Reference [21] appears to have incomplete author information ('Safwan S. Halabi, William Prevedello, Michael Kalpathy-Cramer, and et al.'); please correct the list.
- [General] No code or reproducibility details are provided. Adding a link to an implementation would strengthen the practical contribution.
Circularity Check
No circularity in the derivation chain; Eq. (2) is a genuine convolution identity, and self-citations are supporting, not load-bearing.
full rationale
The paper's central derivation is Eq. (2): M_n^q(ell, tilde y) = (M_c^q(ell, ·) * k(·; sigma^2))(tilde y), obtained from the definitions of M_n and M_c via Bayes rule and Assumptions A.1/A.2. This is a population-level identity, not a restatement of the target result. The algorithm then deconvolves M_n to estimate M_c and chooses q by root-finding on estimated coverage; no clean calibration labels are used to fit q, so the estimated threshold is not a fitted input renamed as a prediction. The score function s=|y-hat y|/hat u is adopted from the authors' prior work [20], and Assumption A.1 is cited to works including [17,18] by the same group, but these citations support design choices or explicit assumptions rather than the conclusion that the deconvolved threshold has target coverage. Section 3.3's sigma estimator is a heuristic ('easy samples') explicitly flagged for future work; an inaccurate sigma would bias coverage (as Table 1 shows), but that is an estimation weakness, not a circular construction. Hence no circular step is present; the main risk is the unvalidated instance-independent noise assumption (A.1) for medical imaging, which is a correctness concern, not circularity.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (4)
- lambda (deconvolution regularization) =
0.01
- delta_y (label discretization width) =
0.01
- delta_q (threshold decrement) =
0.05
- lowest 1% fraction for sigma^2 estimate =
1%
assumptions (5)
- domain assumption Given Y, the clean label, the noise Ỹ and input X are independent (Assumption A.1).
- domain assumption Noise follows a known kernel k(ỹ|y)=k(ỹ-y; sigma^2), specifically additive Gaussian (Assumption A.2).
- ad hoc to paper Deconvolution of M^n with the Gaussian kernel recovers M^c, and the regularized finite-sample solution is accurate.
- ad hoc to paper The model's uncertainty head estimates u^2(X)+sigma^2 when trained on noisy labels, and there exist 'easy' samples with u^2≈0.
- standard math Calibration and test samples are exchangeable.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Efficient Conformal Prediction for Regression Models under Label Noise." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/TKGDMAJI
@misc{pith2026250915120,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Efficient Conformal Prediction for Regression Models under Label Noise},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/TKGDMAJI}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2509.15120}
}
read the original abstract
In high-stakes scenarios, such as medical imaging applications, it is critical to equip the predictions of a regression model with reliable confidence intervals. Recently, Conformal Prediction (CP) has emerged as a powerful statistical framework that, based on a labeled calibration set, generates intervals that include the true labels with a pre-specified probability. In this paper, we address the problem of applying CP for regression models when the calibration set contains noisy labels. We begin by establishing a mathematically grounded procedure for estimating the noise-free CP threshold. Then, we turn it into a practical algorithm that overcomes the challenges arising from the continuous nature of the regression problem. We evaluate the proposed method on two medical imaging regression datasets with Gaussian label noise. Our method significantly outperforms the existing alternative, achieving performance close to the clean-label setting.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
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[1]
INTRODUCTION Regression deep neural networks (DNNs) play a pivotal role in modern machine learning, serving as the backbone of systems that predict continuous values from complex, high- dimensional data. They are widely applied in diverse do- mains: estimating patients’ anatomical metrics from medical images, forecasting energy consumption and financial t...
arXiv 2025
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For a regression task with scalar label, we haveY=R
BACKGROUND Let(X, Y)denote a sample and its label, distributed overX × Y. For a regression task with scalar label, we haveY=R. Consider a DNN that for an input samplex∈ Xoutputs a predictionˆy(x)∈ Y, a calibration set of labeled samples {xi, yi}n i=1, and a predefinedα∈(0,1). Conformal Prediction (CP) establishes a decision rule for generating confidence ...
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A higher score should encode a lower level of agreement betweenxandy
Define a heuristic score functions(x, y)∈Rbased on some output of the model. A higher score should encode a lower level of agreement betweenxandy
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, s(xn, yn)}
Calibration phase: Computeˆqas the⌈(n+ 1)(1−α)⌉/n quantile of the scores{s(x 1, y1), . . . , s(xn, yn)}
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[5]
noisy CP
Deployment phase: Useˆqto create the prediction set for a new samplex n+1:C(x n+1) ={y:s(x n+1, y)≤ˆq}. In the regression case, whereY=R, essentially we get the confidence intervalC(x n+1)⊂R. CP methods possess the following coverage guarantee. Theorem 1 (Theorem 1 in [7])Suppose that{(X i, Yi)}n i=1 and(X n+1, Yn+1)are i.i.d. Defineˆqas in step 2 above a...
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noisy CP
CONFORMAL PREDICTION FOR REGRESSION WITH LABEL NOISE The goal of this paper is to design a CP method that satisfies the pre-defined coverage requirement while providing confi- dence intervals that are much shorter than those of the “noisy CP”. To this end, we will base our method on estimating the CP threshold of the noise-free case. 3.1. Estimating the n...
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EXPERIMENTS In this section, we evaluate the usefulness of our approach in reducing the confidence intervals while preserving coverage. Datasets.We use two medical imaging datasets.BoneAge [21]: hand CT age regression from the RSNA pediatric bone age dataset.Chest X-Ray[22]: large-scale collection of chest radiographs from the NIH, commonly used for disea...
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We developed an iterative deconvolution-based procedure for estimating the noise-free CP threshold, based on a solid mathematical derivation
CONCLUSION We addressed the problem of applying CP for regression DNNs with noisy labels in the calibration set. We developed an iterative deconvolution-based procedure for estimating the noise-free CP threshold, based on a solid mathematical derivation. We evaluated the method on two medical imaging regression datasets with Gaussian label noise and showe...
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Reviewed August 4, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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