CLAPS: Aleatoric-Epistemic Scaling via Last-Layer Laplace for Conformal Regression

arXiv:2512.01384v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal regression provides finite-sample marginal coverage, but interval efficiency depends on how uncertainty is allocated across inputs. We propose \emph{Conformal Laplace-Aware Predictive Scaling} (CLAPS), which combines a learned heteroscedastic scale with last-layer Laplace uncertainty. The learned variance also weights the training features used to construct the posterior, yielding a noise-weighted support correction in the learned representation. The correction contracts as weighted feature information increases and becomes most influential under localized support imbalance. Experiments show near-nominal marginal coverage and modest efficiency improvements over the matched aleatoric baseline on real regression benchmarks.