stat.MLJun 16, 2026

Bounded Difference Concentration for Infinitely Exchangeable Sequences with Applications to AI Benchmark Uncertainty

Authors: Fangyuan Lin, Spencer Frei, Victor H. de la Pena

Abstract

We consider the concentration properties of functions of infinitely exchangeable random variables. By conditioning on the de Finetti directing measure, we show that the deviation of any function with bounded-difference constants c1,…,cnc_1, \dots, c_n decomposes into a conditional sampling fluctuation and a latent mixture fluctuation. When this latent mixture is σmix2σ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2-subgaussian, we establish a concentration inequality with an effective variance proxy of 14∑ici2+σmix2\frac{1}{4}\sum_i c_i^2 + σ_{\mathrm{mix}}^2. Crucially, we demonstrate that for zero-sum linear contrasts, such as the difference between a subsample mean and a full population mean, the latent mixture term cancels exactly. This cancellation yields a tight, mixture-free Hoeffding-type bound that provides a direct de Finetti mechanism for the infinite-extendibility limit of recent finite-exchangeable concentration results. We apply this framework to quantify uncertainty in composite AI benchmarks, such as MMLU, where question items naturally exhibit exchangeable dependence across domains. Our results provide both a domain-stratified hierarchical model for bounding the uncertainty of accuracy scores, and a distribution-free, cost-saving statistical guarantee for accurately estimating full benchmark scores from random subsets.

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