Zijun Jia

Anqi Hu, Zhiyuan Wang, Zijun Jia et al.

Reliable set-valued prediction provides a principled way to mitigate hallucinations in open-ended question answering (QA), yet existing conformal approaches typically rely on a fragile premise: finite sampling must already produce at least one admissible candidate, or calibration examples violating this condition are discarded. In this paper, we introduce MiRD, a two-stage framework that decomposes overall miscoverage into sampling failure and conditional selection failure. In Stage I, MiRD establishes an expectation-level marginal upper bound on the probability that finite sampling produces no admissible answer under a fixed budget. In Stage II, conditioned on sampling success, MiRD calibrates a conformal selection threshold using admission-correlated nonconformity scores defined over the full calibration set, thereby preserving calibration-set integrity. Across three open-ended QA datasets and eight models, MiRD controls sampling risk, conditional selection risk, and overall miscoverage, while yielding tighter first-stage bounds than PAC-style alternatives and more adaptive prediction sets than successful-only calibration.

Zijun Jia, Yuanchang Ye, Sen Jia et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can enhance factuality via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but applying RAG to every query is unnecessary when the model-only answer is reliable. This motivates cascaded RAG: each query is first handled by an LLM-only branch, escalated to a RAG fallback only if the primary branch is uncertain, and abstained from when neither branch is sufficiently trustworthy. However, calibrating such cascades stage by stage may be conservative, since the final utility depends on joint uncertainty thresholding of LLM-only and RAG. In this work, we develop BalanceRAG to certify threshold pairs at a target risk level. Given uncertainty scores from the two branches, BalanceRAG frames each threshold pair as an operating point on a two-dimensional lattice and identifies safe operating points using sequential graphical testing. This enables risk-adaptive threshold calibration, controlling the system-level error rate among accepted points, while retaining more examples. Furthermore, BalanceRAG extends to multi-risk calibration, allowing retrieval usage to be bounded together with the selection-conditioned risk. Experiments on three open-domain question answering (QA) benchmarks across multiple LLM backbones demonstrate that BalanceRAG meets prescribed risk levels, preserves higher coverage and more accepted correct examples, and reduces unnecessary retrieval calls compared with always-on RAG.

Zijun Jia, Jinsong Yu, Hongyu Long et al.

Road rage, often triggered by emotional suppression and sudden outbursts, significantly threatens road safety by causing collisions and aggressive behavior. Speech emotion recognition technologies can mitigate this risk by identifying negative emotions early and issuing timely alerts. However, current SER methods, such as those based on hidden markov models and Long short-term memory networks, primarily handle one-dimensional signals, frequently experience overfitting, and lack calibration, limiting their safety-critical effectiveness. We propose a novel risk-controlled prediction framework providing statistically rigorous guarantees on prediction accuracy. This approach employs a calibration set to define a binary loss function indicating whether the true label is included in the prediction set. Using a data-driven threshold $β$, we optimize a joint loss function to maintain an expected test loss bounded by a user-specified risk level $α$. Evaluations across six baseline models and two benchmark datasets demonstrate our framework consistently achieves a minimum coverage of $1 - α$, effectively controlling marginal error rates despite varying calibration-test split ratios (e.g., 0.1). The robustness and generalizability of the framework are further validated through an extension to small-batch online calibration under a local exchangeability assumption. We construct a non-negative test martingale to maintain prediction validity even in dynamic and non-exchangeable environments. Cross-dataset tests confirm our method's ability to uphold reliable statistical guarantees in realistic, evolving data scenarios.

Zijun Jia, Shuang Liang, Jinsong Yu

Industrial fault diagnosis faces the dual challenges of data scarcity and the difficulty of deploying large AI models in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces Syn-Diag, a novel cloud-edge synergistic framework that leverages Large Language Models to overcome these limitations in few-shot fault diagnosis. Syn-Diag is built on a three-tiered mechanism: 1) Visual-Semantic Synergy, which aligns signal features with the LLM's semantic space through cross-modal pre-training; 2) Content-Aware Reasoning, which dynamically constructs contextual prompts to enhance diagnostic accuracy with limited samples; and 3) Cloud-Edge Synergy, which uses knowledge distillation to create a lightweight, efficient edge model capable of online updates via a shared decision space. Extensive experiments on six datasets covering different CWRU and SEU working conditions show that Syn-Diag significantly outperforms existing methods, especially in 1-shot and cross-condition scenarios. The edge model achieves performance comparable to the cloud version while reducing model size by 83% and latency by 50%, offering a practical, robust, and deployable paradigm for modern intelligent diagnostics.

Mingchen Mei, Yi Li, YiYao Qian et al.

Fault detection is crucial for ensuring the safety and reliability of modern industrial systems. However, a significant scientific challenge is the lack of rigorous risk control and reliable uncertainty quantification in existing diagnostic models, particularly when facing complex scenarios such as distributional shifts. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel fault detection method that integrates significance testing with the conformal prediction framework to provide formal risk guarantees. The method transforms fault detection into a hypothesis testing task by defining a nonconformity measure based on model residuals. It then leverages a calibration dataset to compute p-values for new samples, which are used to construct prediction sets mathematically guaranteed to contain the true label with a user-specified probability, $1-α$. Fault classification is subsequently performed by analyzing the intersection of the constructed prediction set with predefined normal and fault label sets. Experimental results on cross-domain fault diagnosis tasks validate the theoretical properties of our approach. The proposed method consistently achieves an empirical coverage rate at or above the nominal level ($1-α$), demonstrating robustness even when the underlying point-prediction models perform poorly. Furthermore, the results reveal a controllable trade-off between the user-defined risk level ($α$) and efficiency, where higher risk tolerance leads to smaller average prediction set sizes. This research contributes a theoretically grounded framework for fault detection that enables explicit risk control, enhancing the trustworthiness of diagnostic systems in safety-critical applications and advancing the field from simple point predictions to informative, uncertainty-aware outputs.