Related papers: PROVIDENCE: a Flexible Round-by-Round Risk-Limitin…

One approach to risk-limiting audits (RLAs) compares randomly selected cast vote records (CVRs) to votes read by human auditors from the corresponding ballot cards. Historically, such methods reduce audit sample sizes by considering how…

Risk-limiting post election audits guarantee a high probability of correcting incorrect election results, independent of why the result was incorrect. Ballot-polling audits select ballots at random and interpret those ballots as evidence…

Card-level comparison risk-limiting audits (CLCAs) heretofore required a CVR for each cast card and a "link" identifying which CVR is for which card -- which many voting systems cannot provide. Every set of CVRs that produces the same…

Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections are a principled approach to electing multiple candidates in a single election. Each ballot has a starting value of 1, and a candidate is elected if they gather a total vote value more than a defined…

An election audit is risk-limiting if the audit limits (to a pre-specified threshold) the chance that an erroneous electoral outcome will be certified. Extant methods for auditing instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections are either not…

We propose a simple risk-limiting audit for elections, ClipAudit. To determine whether candidate A (the reported winner) actually beat candidate B in a plurality election, ClipAudit draws ballots at random, without replacement, until either…

Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) for many social choice functions can be reduced to testing sets of null hypotheses of the form "the average of this list is not greater than 1/2" for a collection of finite lists of nonnegative numbers. Such…

We propose a simple common framework for Risk-Limiting and Bayesian (polling) audits for two-candidate plurality elections. Using it, we derive an expression for the general Bayesian audit; in particular, we do not restrict the prior to a…

For more than a century, election officials across the United States have inspected voting machines before elections using a procedure called Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). This procedure consists of election officials casting a test…

In the criminal legal context, risk assessment algorithms are touted as data-driven, well-tested tools. Studies known as validation tests are typically cited by practitioners to show that a particular risk assessment algorithm has…

This paper presents DiffSum, a simple post-election risk-limiting ballot-polling audit for two-candidate plurality elections. DiffSum sequentially draws ballots (without replacement) until the numbers $a$, $b$, of votes for candidates $A$,…

Free-text rationales play a pivotal role in explainable NLP, bridging the knowledge and reasoning gaps behind a model's decision-making. However, due to the diversity of potential reasoning paths and a corresponding lack of definitive…

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

While Bayesian-based exploration often demonstrates superior empirical performance compared to bonus-based methods in model-based reinforcement learning (RL), its theoretical understanding remains limited for model-free settings. Existing…

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…

In sensitive domains, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) must be interpretable and robust because errors do not just mislead, they invite lawsuits, undermine scholarly credibility, and breach compliance. Stakeholders require traceable…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable general-purpose robotic policies by mapping visual observations and language instructions to low-level actions, but they often lack reliable introspection. A common practice is to compute a…

Ranked voting systems, such as instant-runoff voting (IRV) and single transferable vote (STV), are used in many places around the world. They are more complex than plurality and scoring rules, presenting a challenge for auditing their…

Group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO) aims to develop models that perform well across $m$ distributions simultaneously. Existing GDRO algorithms can only process a fixed number of samples per iteration, either 1 or $m$, and…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a core training stage in recent large language models (LLMs). Its reliance on non-public, high-value prompt sets raises concerns about unauthorized data use, creating a need…