Research map / Probabilistic and scientific modeling / Uncertainty and Gaussian processes
Conformal prediction methods
Constructs conformal prediction sets with localized, ensemble and Bayesian approaches.
29 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2020–2026) · an approach in Uncertainty and Gaussian processes, keyword cluster “conformal · intervals · prediction”
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Where it stands
Not enough benchmark data Fewer than four papers report the same benchmark, so there is no record to follow.
6 papers in 2023–24 and 18 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic grew, from 2.2% to 5.8%.
How this is decided
A benchmark is tracked when at least four papers of this approach report their own method on the same dataset and metric in at least two different years. Its record is the best number reported up to 2024 compared with the best reported in 2025–26: still improving means at least 1% better, flat means at most 0.2% better with at least two papers from 2025–26 trying. Numbers on a different scale from the rest (a fraction among percentages) and far outliers are left out. Results come from different papers with different setups, so they are signals, not head-to-head comparisons. The share of papers is counted at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI.
How it got here
Most cited paper of each year
- 2020 · Predictive inference is free with the jackknife+-after-bootstrap (NeurIPS 2020 · 40 citations)
- 2021 · Conformal Bayesian Computation (NeurIPS 2021 · 0 citations)
- 2022 · Conformal Frequency Estimation with Sketched Data (NeurIPS 2022 · 1 citation)
- 2023 · AmnioML: Amniotic Fluid Segmentation and Volume Prediction with Uncertainty Quantification (AAAI 2023 · 7 citations)
- 2024 · An Information Theoretic Perspective on Conformal Prediction (NeurIPS 2024 · 5 citations)
- 2025 · CUQDS: Conformal Uncertainty Quantification Under Distribution Shift for Trajectory Prediction (AAAI 2025 · 8 citations)
- 2026 · Spatial Conformal Inference through Localized Quantile Regression (ICML 2026 · 1 citation)
Earliest papers here
- Predictive inference is free with the jackknife+-after-bootstrap (NeurIPS 2020 · 40 citations)
- Conformal Bayesian Computation (NeurIPS 2021 · 0 citations)
- Distribution-free inference for regression: discrete, continuous, and in between (NeurIPS 2021 · 0 citations)
What has been tried
18 papers here report 142 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 64%, no clear effect 13%, hurt 17%, mixed 6%. Papers mostly publish changes that helped, so "helped" is over-represented.
Ablations in recent papers
| What was changed | Measured on | Result | Effect | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Replace adaptive P control calibration with fixed split conformal prediction | Argoverse 1 testing · coverage rate | 0.746 vs 0.402 | Hurt | CUQDS: Conformal Uncertainty Quantification Under Distribution Shift for Trajectory Prediction (AAAI 2025 · 8 citations) |
| Add CQR scores to CIA | Bike Sharing, Community Crime, MEPS, Anaheim and Chicago · interval size | Mixed | Conformalized Interval Arithmetic with Symmetric Calibration (AAAI 2025 · 3 citations) | |
| Replace uncalibrated residual scores with Venn-Abers calibrated scores | Synthetic Experiment 1 · average interval width | Helped | Self-Calibrating Conformal Prediction (NeurIPS 2024 · 2 citations) | |
| use two-stage calibration instead of single-stage calibration | OpenML regression tasks · coverage | Helped | Conformal Prediction for Ensembles: Improving Efficiency via Score-Based Aggregation (NeurIPS 2025 · 1 citation) | |
| Vary the penalty weight λ across the reported values | CIFAR100, ImageNet, iNaturalist, Fitzpatrick, and Fitzpatrick Clean · separable loss | Mixed | Utility-Directed Conformal Prediction: A Decision-Aware Framework for Actionable Uncertainty Quantification (ICLR 2025 · 0 citations) |
What reviewers will expect
Datasets and baselines named in the 10 papers of this approach from 2025–2026 that have a full-text summary. Leaving out the common ones is a frequent review question.
Datasets
- ImageNet · 3 of 10 papers
- CIFAR-100 · 2 of 10 papers
Baselines
- Conformal Risk Control · 2 of 10 papers
Recent preprints
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Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Regression uncertainty quantification (43 papers)
Elsewhere in the topic
- Nonparametric and PAC-Bayes Bayesian learning (130 papers)
- Simulation-based inference (118 papers)
- Priors and functional variational uncertainty (112 papers)
- Variational Bayesian deep learning (105 papers)
- Approximate inference in Bayesian neural networks (93 papers)
- Sparse variational Gaussian processes (92 papers)
- PAC-Bayes and decoupled GP learning (83 papers)
- Epistemic versus aleatoric decomposition (75 papers)
Benchmark numbers, ablations and baseline numbers are extracted by AI from each paper's full text and can be wrong; the paper is the authority. Data: results index of 2026-11-02, citation counts from OpenAlex (2026-10-09).