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Related papers: Adaptive Risk-Limiting Ballot Comparison Audits

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A local specialist LLM, fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) on operator-local data, is installed in a regulated organization with per-deployment error budget $\alpha$. The operator needs a safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Hamed Khosravi , Xiaoming Huo

We introduce the notion of a risk-limiting financial auditing (RLFA): given $N$ transactions, the goal is to estimate the total misstated monetary fraction~($m^*$) to a given accuracy $\epsilon$, with confidence $1-\delta$. We do this by…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-12 Shubhanshu Shekhar , Ziyu Xu , Zachary C. Lipton , Pierre J. Liang , Aaditya Ramdas

The City and County of San Francisco, CA, has used Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) for some elections since 2004. This report describes the first ever process pilot of Risk Limiting Audits for IRV, for the San Francisco District Attorney's race…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Michelle Blom , Andrew Conway , Dan King , Laurent Sandrolini , Philip B. Stark , Peter J. Stuckey , Vanessa Teague

Elections where electors rank the candidates (or a subset of the candidates) in order of preference allow the collection of more information about the electors' intent. The most widely used election of this type is Instant-Runoff Voting…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Michelle Blom , Peter J. Stuckey , Vanessa Teague , Damjan Vukcevic

We propose an approach for preventing unsafe or otherwise low-quality large language model (LLM) outputs by leveraging the stochasticity of LLMs, an approach we call Repeated Checking with Regeneration (RCR). In this system, LLM checkers…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jake R. Watts , Joel Sokol

Limited Voting (LV) is an approval-based method for multi-winner elections where all ballots are required to have a same fixed size. While it appears to be used as voting method in corporate governance and has some political applications,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Maaike Venema-Los , Zoé Christoff , Davide Grossi

Several election districts in the US have recently moved to ranked-choice voting (RCV) to decide the results of local elections. RCV allows voters to rank their choices, and the results are computed in rounds, eliminating one candidate at a…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Alborz Jelvani , Amélie Marian

We derive a closed-form expression capturing the degree of Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) of investors for non-"fair" lotteries. We argue that our formula is superior to earlier methods that have been proposed, as it is a function of only…

General Economics · Economics 2022-11-10 George Samartzis , Nikitas Pittis

The problem of finding the optimal portfolio for investors is called the portfolio optimization problem. Such problem mainly concerns the expectation and variability of return (i.e., mean and variance). Although the variance would be the…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2020-07-21 Kei Nakagawa , Shuhei Noma , Masaya Abe

Risk measures are important key figures to measure the adequacy of the reserves of a company. The most common risk measures in practice are Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). Recently, quantum-based algorithms are…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-01-29 Christian Laudagé , Ivica Turkalj

Tabulation audits for an election provide statistical evidence that a reported contest outcome is "correct" (meaning that the tabulation of votes was properly performed), or else the tabulation audit determines the correct outcome. Stark…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-02-13 Ronald L. Rivest

Georgia was central to efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, including a call from then-president Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger asking Raffensperger to `find' 11,780 votes. Raffensperger has maintained that…

Applications · Statistics 2024-09-06 Philip B. Stark

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a simple but powerful paradigm for training LLMs: sample a completion, verify it, and update. In practice, however, the verifier is almost never clean--unit tests probe only limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Ali Rad , Khashayar Filom , Darioush Keivan , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Ehsan Kamalinejad

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and generalization in embodied manipulation. However, their decision-making relies on a fast, instinctive process that lacks deliberation. This strategy often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Wenhao Li , Xiu Su , Yichao Cao , Hongyan Xu , Xiaobo Xia , Shan You , Yi Chen , Chang Xu

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yu Chen , Yihan Du , Pihe Hu , Siwei Wang , Desheng Wu , Longbo Huang

Ensembling Vision-Language Models (VLMs) from different providers maximizes benchmark accuracy, yet models from the same architectural family share correlated errors that standard voting ignores. We study this structure across 17 VLMs from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Zacharie Bugaud

Risk-limiting post-election audits limit the chance of certifying an electoral outcome if the outcome is not what a full hand count would show. Building on previous work, we report on pilot risk-limiting audits in four elections during 2008…

Certifying neural network robustness against adversarial examples is challenging, as formal guarantees often require solving non-convex problems. Hence, incomplete verifiers are widely used because they scale efficiently and substantially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Mohammadreza Maleki , Rushendra Sidibomma , Arman Adibi , Reza Samavi

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a practical, scalable way to improve large language models on math, code, and other structured tasks. However, we argue that many headline RLVR gains are not yet well validated…

Drawing a random sample of ballots to conduct a risk-limiting audit generally requires knowing how the ballots cast in an election are organized into groups, for instance, how many containers of ballots there are in all and how many ballots…

Applications · Statistics 2012-07-17 Jorge H. Banuelos , Philip B. Stark