Synthetic-powered predictive inference
Meshi Bashari, Roy Maor Lotan, Yonghoon Lee, Edgar Dobriban, Yaniv Romano
Conformal prediction is a framework for predictive inference with a distribution-free, finite-sample guarantee. However, it tends to provide uninformative prediction sets  when calibration data are scarce. This paper introduces Synthetic-powered predictive inference (SPPI), a novel framework that incorporates synthetic data---e.g., from a generative model---to improve sample efficiency. At the core of our method is a score transporter: an empirical quantile mapping that aligns nonconformity scores from trusted, real data with those from synthetic data. By carefully integrating the score transporter into the calibration process, SPPI provably achieves finite-sample coverage guarantees without making any assumptions about the real and synthetic data distributions. When the score distributions are well aligned, SPPI yields substantially tighter and more informative prediction sets than standard conformal prediction. Experiments on image classification and tabular regression demonstrate notable improvements in predictive efficiency in data-scarce settings.