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Related papers: Ranking with Abstention

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Abstaining classifiers have the option to abstain from making predictions on inputs that they are unsure about. These classifiers are becoming increasingly popular in high-stakes decision-making problems, as they can withhold uncertain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-10 Yo Joong Choe , Aditya Gangrade , Aaditya Ramdas

In this work, we consider a binary classification problem and cast it into a binary hypothesis testing framework, where the observations can be perturbed by an adversary. To improve the adversarial robustness of a classifier, we include an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Vaibhav Katewa , Fabio Pasqualetti

Ranked decision systems -- recommenders, ad auctions, clinical triage queues -- must decide when to intervene in ranked outputs and when to abstain. We study when confidence-based abstention monotonically improves decision quality, and when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Ronald Doku

In high-stakes applications, predictive models must not only produce accurate predictions but also quantify and communicate their uncertainty. Reject-option prediction addresses this by allowing the model to abstain when prediction…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Vojtech Franc , Jakub Paplham

We explore the problem of binary classification in machine learning, with a twist - the classifier is allowed to abstain on any datum, professing ignorance about the true class label without committing to any prediction. This is directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Akshay Balsubramani

We present an extensive study of the key problem of online learning where algorithms are allowed to abstain from making predictions. In the adversarial setting, we show how existing online algorithms and guarantees can be adapted to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Corinna Cortes , Giulia DeSalvo , Claudio Gentile , Mehryar Mohri , Scott Yang

We consider the problem of binary classification with abstention in the relatively less studied \emph{bounded-rate} setting. We begin by obtaining a characterization of the Bayes optimal classifier for an arbitrary input-label distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-24 Shubhanshu Shekhar , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Tara Javidi

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Bingbing Wen , Jihan Yao , Shangbin Feng , Chenjun Xu , Yulia Tsvetkov , Bill Howe , Lucy Lu Wang

We investigate the problem of regression where one is allowed to abstain from predicting. We refer to this framework as regression with reject option as an extension of classification with reject option. In this context, we focus on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-08 Christophe Denis , Mohamed Hebiri , Ahmed Zaoui

Algorithmic decision making is increasingly prevalent, but often vulnerable to strategic manipulation by agents seeking a favorable outcome. Prior research has shown that classifier abstention (allowing a classifier to decline making a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Lina Alkarmi , Ziyuan Huang , Mingyan Liu

Selective regression allows abstention from prediction if the confidence to make an accurate prediction is not sufficient. In general, by allowing a reject option, one expects the performance of a regression model to increase at the cost of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Abhin Shah , Yuheng Bu , Joshua Ka-Wing Lee , Subhro Das , Rameswar Panda , Prasanna Sattigeri , Gregory W. Wornell

Motivated by applications to resource-limited and safety-critical domains, we study selective classification in the online learning model, wherein a predictor may abstain from classifying an instance. For example, this may model an adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Aditya Gangrade , Anil Kag , Ashok Cutkosky , Venkatesh Saligrama

The ranking problem is to order a collection of units by some unobserved parameter, based on observations from the associated distribution. This problem arises naturally in a number of contexts, such as business, where we may want to rank…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-04 Toby Kenney

Motivated by Supervised Opinion Analysis, we propose a novel framework devoted to Structured Output Learning with Abstention (SOLA). The structure prediction model is able to abstain from predicting some labels in the structured output at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-16 Alexandre Garcia , Slim Essid , Chloé Clavel , Florence d'Alché-Buc

In critical applications, it is vital for classifiers to defer decision-making to humans. We propose a post-hoc method that makes existing classifiers selectively abstain from predicting certain samples. Our abstaining classifier is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Tongxin Yin , Jean-François Ton , Ruocheng Guo , Yuanshun Yao , Mingyan Liu , Yang Liu

Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal with uninformative signals due to position in the ranking, saliency, and other presentation factors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Aman Agarwal , Ivan Zaitsev , Thorsten Joachims

Model evolution and constant availability of data are two common phenomena in large-scale real-world machine learning applications, e.g. ads and recommendation systems. To adapt, the real-world system typically retrain with all available…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Jian Zhu , Congcong Liu , Pei Wang , Xiwei Zhao , Zhangang Lin , Jingping Shao

Modern machine learning approaches to classification, including AdaBoost, support vector machines, and deep neural networks, utilize surrogate loss techniques to circumvent the computational complexity of minimizing empirical classification…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-07-26 Toru Kitagawa , Shosei Sakaguchi , Aleksey Tetenov

Neural Information Retrieval (NIR) has significantly improved upon heuristic-based Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Yet, failures remain frequent, the models used often being unable to retrieve documents relevant to the user's query. We…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef , Manuel Faysse , Emmanuel Malherbe , Céline Hudelot , Pierre Colombo

We study the problem of classification with a reject option for a fixed predictor, applicable in natural language processing. We introduce a new problem formulation for this scenario, and an algorithm minimizing a new surrogate loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Christopher Mohri , Daniel Andor , Eunsol Choi , Michael Collins