CARM: Conformal Adaptive Risk Masking for Reliable Scientific Super-Resolution

Authors: Guangtao Zhang , Haonan Wu , Junxuan Gao , Zhengyang Liu , Zhaoxi Zeng , Zhihao Li , Jianguo Huang , Zhiqiang Liu

View a PDF of the paper titled CARM: Conformal Adaptive Risk Masking for Reliable Scientific Super-Resolution, by Guangtao Zhang and 7 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

Abstract: Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) can reconstruct fine-scale Earth-observation fields from coarse observations, but reconstruction accuracy alone does not provide a calibrated rule for identifying reliable spatial regions. Conformal Mask Calibration (CMC), built on conformal risk control, converts a spatial uncertainty score into a trust mask and controls the expected worst-case local distortion under exchangeability. However, its fixed threshold can become miscalibrated in Earth-observation streams affected by seasonality and episodic events. We propose $\textit{CARM}$ (Conformal Adaptive Risk Masking), a statistical framework for adaptive spatial risk control under temporal distribution shift. CARM maintains experts with heterogeneous update rates and aggregates their threshold proposals online using an asymmetric surrogate loss, balancing rapid adaptation to distribution changes against stability during relatively stationary periods. All updates are causal and use only mature feedback available after a fixed delay, allowing CARM to operate with any SR model that provides a spatial uncertainty score. We prove that the time-averaged mask-conditioned risk converges to at most $\alpha$ at an $O(1/T)$ rate, without distributional assumptions and for any choice of aggregation weights across experts. On a daily South China Sea chlorophyll-$\textit{a}$ SR stream, CARM reduces the empirical violation rate from $43.49\%$ to $9.38\%$ and the moving-average exceedance frequency from $47.29\%$ to $1.22\%$ at $\alpha=0.10$, while retaining a non-trivial trusted region. Experiments on ERA5 wind and OSTIA sea-surface temperature further show consistent relative improvements across multiple SR backbones.

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ; Machine Learning (cs.LG); Probability (math.PR)

Cite as:

arXiv:2611.06151 [cs.AI]

(or

arXiv:2611.06151v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.06151

Focus to learn more

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Jianguo Huang [ view email ]

[v1]

Wed, 4 Nov 2026 08:32:19 UTC (389 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled CARM: Conformal Adaptive Risk Masking for Reliable Scientific Super-Resolution, by Guangtao Zhang and 7 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Additional Features

Audio Summary

Current browse context:

cs.AI

< prev

next >

new

recent

| 2026-11

Change to browse by:

cs

cs.LG

math

math.PR

References & Citations

SciX

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

export BibTeX citation

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...

Data provided by:

Bookmark

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? )

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? )

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? )

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? )

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? )

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? )

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? )

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? )

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? )

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? )

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate ( What is Replicate? )

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? )

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? )

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? )

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? )

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? |

Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? )