Roy Maor Lotan

Meshi Bashari, Roy Maor Lotan, Yonghoon Lee et al.

Conformal prediction is a framework for predictive inference with a distribution-free, finite-sample guarantee. However, it tends to provide uninformative prediction sets when calibration data are scarce. This paper introduces Synthetic-powered predictive inference (SPI), a novel framework that incorporates synthetic data -- e.g., from a generative model -- to improve sample efficiency. At the core of our method is a score transporter: an empirical quantile mapping that aligns nonconformity scores from trusted, real data with those from synthetic data. By carefully integrating the score transporter into the calibration process, SPI provably achieves finite-sample coverage guarantees without making any assumptions about the real and synthetic data distributions. When the score distributions are well aligned, SPI yields substantially tighter and more informative prediction sets than standard conformal prediction. Experiments on image classification -- augmenting data with synthetic diffusion-model generated images -- and on tabular regression demonstrate notable improvements in predictive efficiency in data-scarce settings.

Roy Maor Lotan, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Yaniv Romano

Auctions are key for maximizing sellers' revenue and ensuring truthful bidding among buyers. Recently, an approach known as differentiable economics based on machine learning (ML) has shown promise in learning powerful auction mechanisms for multiple items and participants. However, this approach has no guarantee of strategy-proofness at test time. Strategy-proofness is crucial as it ensures that buyers are incentivized to bid their true valuations, leading to optimal and fair auction outcomes without the risk of manipulation. In this work, we propose a formulation of statistical strategy-proofness for auction mechanisms. Specifically, we offer a method that bounds the regret -- quantifying deviation from truthful bidding -- below a pre-specified level with high probability. Building upon conformal prediction techniques, we develop an auction acceptance rule that leverages regret predictions to guarantee that the data-driven auction mechanism meets the statistical strategy-proofness requirement with high probability. Our method -- Statistically Truthful Auctions via Acceptance Rule (STAR) -- represents a practical middle-ground between two extremes: enforcing truthfulness -- zero-regret -- at the cost of significant revenue loss, and naively using ML to construct auctions with the hope of attaining low regret, with no test-time guarantees.