WATCH: Adaptive Monitoring for AI Deployments via Weighted-Conformal Martingales

Abstract:Responsibly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) systems in high-stakes settings arguably requires not only proof of system reliability, but also continual, post-deployment monitoring to quickly detect and address any unsafe behavior. Methods for nonparametric sequential testing -- especially conformal test martingales (CTMs) and anytime-valid inference -- offer promising tools for this monitoring task. However, existing approaches are restricted to monitoring limited hypothesis classes or ``alarm criteria'' (e.g., detecting data shifts that violate certain exchangeability or IID assumptions), do not allow for online adaptation in response to shifts, and/or cannot diagnose the cause of degradation or alarm. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing a weighted generalization of conformal test martingales (WCTMs), which lay a theoretical foundation for online monitoring for any unexpected changepoints in the data distribution while controlling false-alarms. For practical applications, we propose specific WCTM algorithms that adapt online to mild covariate shifts (in the marginal input distribution), quickly detect harmful shifts, and diagnose those harmful shifts as concept shifts (in the conditional label distribution) or extreme (out-of-support) covariate shifts that cannot be easily adapted to. On real-world datasets, we demonstrate improved performance relative to state-of-the-art baselines.

Published at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025. v5: earlier versions (arXiv:2505.04608v1-v4 and the original ICML proceedings version) erroneously omitted an assumption (bag sufficiency) from the main theorem, which we correct here. Practical and experimental claims are unaffected. See Remark 3.5

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

arXiv:2505.04608 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2505.04608v5 [cs.LG] for this version)