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Related papers: Ranking with Abstention

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Abstaining classifiers have the option to refrain from providing a prediction for instances that are difficult to classify. The abstention mechanism is designed to trade off the classifier's performance on the accepted data while ensuring a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Daphne Lenders , Andrea Pugnana , Roberto Pellungrini , Toon Calders , Dino Pedreschi , Fosca Giannotti

Selective prediction, where a model has the option to abstain from making a decision, is crucial for machine learning applications in which mistakes are costly. In this work, we focus on distributional regression and introduce a framework…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-04-01 Ahmed Zaoui , Clément Dombry

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hen Davidov , Nachshon Cohen , Oren Kalinsky , Yaron Fairstein , Guy Kushilevitz , Ram Yazdi , Patrick Rebeschini

Learning to rank is a supervised learning problem where the output space is the space of rankings but the supervision space is the space of relevance scores. We make theoretical contributions to the learning to rank problem both in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-06 Sougata Chaudhuri , Ambuj Tewari

Modern language models fail a fundamental requirement of trustworthy intelligence: knowing when not to answer. Despite achieving impressive accuracy on benchmarks, these models produce confident hallucinations, even when wrong answers carry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mohamad Amin Mohamadi , Tianhao Wang , Zhiyuan Li

Although neural networks (especially deep neural networks) have achieved \textit{better-than-human} performance in many fields, their real-world deployment is still questionable due to the lack of awareness about the limitation in their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Mehedi Hasan , Moloud Abdar , Abbas Khosravi , Uwe Aickelin , Pietro Lio' , Ibrahim Hossain , Ashikur Rahman , Saeid Nahavandi

We study the problem of sequential prediction in the stochastic setting with an adversary that is allowed to inject clean-label adversarial (or out-of-distribution) examples. Algorithms designed to handle purely stochastic data tend to fail…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Surbhi Goel , Steve Hanneke , Shay Moran , Abhishek Shetty

Despite the power of deep neural networks for a wide range of tasks, an overconfident prediction issue has limited their practical use in many safety-critical applications. Many recent works have been proposed to mitigate this issue, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Jooyoung Moon , Jihyo Kim , Younghak Shin , Sangheum Hwang

Learning with rejection is an important framework that can refrain from making predictions to avoid critical mispredictions by balancing between prediction and rejection. Previous studies on cost-based rejection only focused on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Xin Cheng , Yuzhou Cao , Haobo Wang , Hongxin Wei , Bo An , Lei Feng

Rankings are central to decision-making in fields ranging from education to online platforms, yet classical deterministic methods such as the Borda count method or Copeland-type pairwise methods ignore uncertainty due to sampling noise or…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-20 Shunpu Zhang

In this work, we consider ranking problems among a finite set of candidates: for instance, selecting the top-$k$ items among a larger list of candidates or obtaining the full ranking of all items in the set. These problems are often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-04 Ruiting Liang , Jake A. Soloff , Rina Foygel Barber , Rebecca Willett

We introduce the problem of ranking with slot constraints, which can be used to model a wide range of application problems -- from college admission with limited slots for different majors, to composing a stratified cohort of eligible…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Wentao Guo , Andrew Wang , Bradon Thymes , Thorsten Joachims

Selective classification enhances the reliability of predictive models by allowing them to abstain from making uncertain predictions. In this work, we revisit the design of optimal selection functions through the lens of the Neyman--Pearson…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Alvin Heng , Harold Soh

Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal. While it was recently shown how counterfactual learning-to-rank (LTR) approaches…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2018-12-14 Aman Agarwal , Ivan Zaitsev , Xuanhui Wang , Cheng Li , Marc Najork , Thorsten Joachims

In machine learning, the loss functions optimized during training often differ from the target loss that defines task performance due to computational intractability or lack of differentiability. We present an in-depth study of the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Yutao Zhong

In most machine learning applications, classification accuracy is not the primary metric of interest. Binary classifiers which face class imbalance are often evaluated by the $F_\beta$ score, area under the precision-recall curve, Precision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-02 Alan Mackey , Xiyang Luo , Elad Eban

We study active learning where the labeler can not only return incorrect labels but also abstain from labeling. We consider different noise and abstention conditions of the labeler. We propose an algorithm which utilizes abstention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-01 Songbai Yan , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Tara Javidi

We study online learning in the adversarial injection model introduced by [Goel et al. 2017], where a stream of labeled examples is predominantly drawn i.i.d.\ from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$, but may be interspersed with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Ezra Edelman , Surbhi Goel

This paper establishes a connection between the fields of machine learning (ML) and philosophy concerning the phenomenon of behaving neutrally. It investigates a specific class of ML systems capable of delivering a neutral response to a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Daniela Schuster

Machine learning models always make a prediction, even when it is likely to be inaccurate. This behavior should be avoided in many decision support applications, where mistakes can have severe consequences. Albeit already studied in 1970,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Kilian Hendrickx , Lorenzo Perini , Dries Van der Plas , Wannes Meert , Jesse Davis