CAOS: Conformal Aggregation of One-Shot Predictors
Abstract
One-shot prediction enables rapid adaptation of pretrained foundation models to new tasks using only one labeled example, but lacks principled uncertainty quantification. While conformal prediction provides finite-sample coverage guarantees, standard split conformal methods are inefficient in the one-shot setting due to data splitting and reliance on a single predictor. We propose Conformal Aggregation of One-Shot Predictors (CAOS), a conformal framework that adaptively aggregates multiple one-shot predictors and uses a leave-one-out calibration scheme to fully exploit scarce labeled data. Despite violating classical exchangeability assumptions, we prove that CAOS achieves valid marginal coverage using a monotonicity-based argument. Experiments on one-shot facial landmarking and RAFT text classification tasks show that CAOS produces substantially smaller prediction sets than split conformal baselines while maintaining reliable coverage.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Face recognition and analysis
Face and Expression Recognition
Publication details
- Journal / source
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Publication date
- 8 January 2026
- Document type
- Preprint