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Optimal Recalibration of an Online Predictor

2026/07/22 by Lunjia Hu, Kevin Tian, Chutong Yang
#stat.ML #cs.DS #cs.LG

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Abstract

We study the problem of recalibrating an online predictor [KE17, OKS24]: given an arbitrary "hint" sequence of forecasts, the learner must output new predictions that are calibrated while incurring small excess error relative to the original forecasts, under a proper loss. We give an online algorithm that achieves (ε, ε2)-recalibration for Lipschitz proper losses in T ≈ ε-3 rounds, using an imbalanced extension of the recent simultaneous Blackwell approachability reduction framework of [HTY26]. We show that this tradeoff is optimal by proving a matching lower bound for recalibrating against the squared loss. We also prove a companion K2-recalibration theorem that obtains the same tradeoffs up to a logarithmic factor. As our main application, we show how our recalibration algorithms can be combined with the online refinement method of [FH23] to obtain simultaneous ε-calibration and ε2-calibeating for smooth proper losses at the same asymptotic rate, improving upon prior works that achieved these properties separately or with a worse ε dependence. In particular, the K2 variant answers a question of [CHJL26] on simultaneously achieving near-optimal calibeating and calibration rates. We also derive extensions to settings with multiple hint sequences. Finally, we empirically evaluate our algorithms on a classification dataset undergoing distribution shift.

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