Conformal Set-based Human-AI Complementarity with Multiple Experts

Abstract: Decision support systems are designed to assist human experts in classification tasks by providing conformal prediction sets derived from a pre-trained model. This human-AI collaboration has demonstrated enhanced classification performance compared to using either the model or the expert independently. In this study, we focus on the selection of instance-specific experts from a pool of multiple human experts, contrasting it with existing research that typically focuses on single-expert scenarios. We characterize the conditions under which multiple experts can benefit from the conformal sets. With the insight that only certain experts may be relevant for each instance, we explore the problem of subset selection and introduce a greedy algorithm that utilizes conformal sets to identify the subset of expert predictions that will be used in classifying an instance. This approach is shown to yield better performance compared to naive methods for human subset selection. Based on real expert predictions from the CIFAR-10H and ImageNet-16H datasets, our simulation study indicates that our proposed greedy algorithm achieves near-optimal subsets, resulting in improved classification performance among multiple experts.