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Poster

When is Multicalibration Post-Processing Necessary?

Dutch Hansen · Siddartha Devic · Preetum Nakkiran · Vatsal Sharan

West Ballroom A-D #5505
[ ]
Thu 12 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Calibration is a well-studied property of predictors which guarantees meaningful uncertainty estimates. Multicalibration is a related notion --- originating in algorithmic fairness --- which requires predictors to be simultaneously calibrated over a potentially complex and overlapping collection of protected subpopulations (such as groups defined by ethnicity, race, or income). We conduct the first comprehensive study evaluating the usefulness of multicalibration post-processing across a broad set of tabular, image, and language datasets for models spanning from simple decision trees to 90 million parameter fine-tuned LLMs. Our findings can be summarized as follows: (1) models which are calibrated out of the box tend to be relatively multicalibrated without any additional post-processing; (2) multicalibration can help inherently uncalibrated models; and (3) traditional calibration measures may sometimes provide multicalibration implicitly. More generally, we also distill many independent observations which may be useful for practical and effective applications of multicalibration post-processing in real-world contexts.

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