English

Graph-Smoothed Bayesian Black-Box Shift Estimator and Its Information Geometry

Machine Learning 2025-05-23 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Label shift adaptation aims to recover target class priors when the labelled source distribution PP and the unlabelled target distribution QQ share P(XY)=Q(XY)P(X \mid Y) = Q(X \mid Y) but P(Y)Q(Y)P(Y) \neq Q(Y). Classical black-box shift estimators invert an empirical confusion matrix of a frozen classifier, producing a brittle point estimate that ignores sampling noise and similarity among classes. We present Graph-Smoothed Bayesian BBSE (GS-B3^3SE), a fully probabilistic alternative that places Laplacian-Gaussian priors on both target log-priors and confusion-matrix columns, tying them together on a label-similarity graph. The resulting posterior is tractable with HMC or a fast block Newton-CG scheme. We prove identifiability, N1/2N^{-1/2} contraction, variance bounds that shrink with the graph's algebraic connectivity, and robustness to Laplacian misspecification. We also reinterpret GS-B3^3SE through information geometry, showing that it generalizes existing shift estimators.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.16251,
  title  = {Graph-Smoothed Bayesian Black-Box Shift Estimator and Its Information Geometry},
  author = {Masanari Kimura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.16251},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:30:28.954Z