Conditional Factuality Controlled LLMs with Generalization Certificates via Conformal Sampling
Ye, Kai, Pan, Qingtao, Li, Shuo
原文摘要
Large language models (LLMs) need reliable test-time control of hallucinations. Existing conformal methods for LLMs typically provide only marginal guarantees and rely on a single global threshold, which can under-cover hard prompts, over-cover easy ones, and produce oversized prediction sets. We propose Conditional Factuality Control (CFC), a post-hoc conformal framework that returns set-valued outputs with conditional coverage guarantees. CFC defines a continuous, feature-conditional acceptance threshold through augmented quantile regression on a latent "success" score, and deploys it through a fixed-point threshold rule at inference time. Theoretically, we show that CFC satisfies a conditional coverage guarantee under exchangeability and analyze its efficiency, proving that, under mild assumptions on the score distributions, the conditional rule is strictly more sample-efficient than marginal conformal prediction at the same target coverage. We further derive a PAC-style variant, CFC-PAC, which shrinks the nominal risk level based on a stability bound, yielding a finite-sample certificate that the conditional miscoverage deviates from the target by at most a slack. Empirically, on synthetic data, real-world reasoning and QA benchmarks, and a Flickr8k VLM setting, CFC and CFC-PAC consistently attain near-target coverage across difficulty groups while using smaller prediction sets than CP and non-CP baselines.
cs.CV · cs.CL
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表