Abstention is all you need

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Despite their outstanding performance across various NLP tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still produce incorrect answers, which can be harmful in safety-critical domains like medicine and autonomous driving. To address this issue, selective prediction systems aim to reject predictions from LLMs that are likely to be incorrect. However, current approaches either rely on querying the LLM multiple times, requiring access to its internals, or fine-Tuning it. Given the significant operational costs of an LLM, we propose a selective prediction system that does not involve the LLM during inference. We conduct an extensive experimental study regarding training data sizes, time consumption, utilized models, and embeddings, improving on the current state-of-The-Art while treating the LLM as a black box, without accessing its internals or requiring fine-Tuning.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2025 IEEE 12th International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, DSAA 2025
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Number of pages10
ISBN (electronic)979-8-3315-1179-1
ISBN (print)979-8-3315-1180-7
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesInternational Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA)

Conference

Title12th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics
Abbreviated titleDSAA 2025
Conference number12
Duration9 - 12 October 2025
Website
LocationEdgbaston Park Hotel
CityBirmingham
CountryUnited Kingdom

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-8107-2775/work/219265701

Keywords

Keywords

  • learning with abstention, learning with rejection, selective prediction