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Related papers: Cost-Saving LLM Cascades with Early Abstention

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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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have a natural role in answering complex queries about data streams, but the high computational cost of LLM inference makes them infeasible in many such tasks. We propose online cascade learning, the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Lunyiu Nie , Zhimin Ding , Erdong Hu , Christopher Jermaine , Swarat Chaudhuri

A challenge in human-AI decision-making is to balance three factors: the correctness of predictions, the cost of knowledge and reasoning complexity, and the confidence about whether to abstain from automated answers or escalate to human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Claudio Fanconi , Mihaela van der Schaar

Large language models (LLMs) rarely admit uncertainty, often producing fluent but misleading answers, rather than abstaining (i.e., refusing to answer). This weakness is even evident in temporal question answering, where models frequently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Xinyu Zhou , Chang Jin , Carsten Eickhoff , Zhijiang Guo , Seyed Ali Bahrainian

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in production environments face a fundamental safety-utility trade-off either a strict filtering mechanisms prevent harmful outputs but often block benign queries or a relaxed controls risk unsafe…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Ankit Sharma , Nachiket Tapas , Jyotiprakash Patra

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed, models must effectively know when not to answer: abstain. Reasoning models, in particular, have gained attention for impressive performance on complex tasks. However, reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Abinitha Gourabathina , Inkit Padhi , Manish Nagireddy , Subhajit Chaudhury , Prasanna Sattigeri

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified, ill-posed, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Polina Kirichenko , Mark Ibrahim , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Samuel J. Bell

Current evaluation of large language models (LLMs) overwhelmingly prioritizes accuracy; however, in real-world and safety-critical applications, the ability to abstain when uncertain is equally vital for trustworthy deployment. We introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Sravanthi Machcha , Sushrita Yerra , Sahil Gupta , Aishwarya Sahoo , Sharmin Sultana , Hong Yu , Zonghai Yao

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have exhibited remarkable performance in a variety of tasks, but this strong performance often comes with the high expense of using paid API services. In this paper, we are motivated to study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Murong Yue , Jie Zhao , Min Zhang , Liang Du , Ziyu Yao

Deploying large language models in production requires simultaneous attention to efficiency and risk control. Prior work has shown the possibility to cut costs while maintaining similar accuracy, but has neglected to focus on risk control.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Michael J. Zellinger , Matt Thomson

Large Language Model (LLM) cascade systems are designed to balance efficiency and performance by processing queries with lightweight models while selectively escalating complex cases to more powerful ones. Such systems seek to reduces…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zehan Sun , Dingfan Chen , Songze Li

Performing inference on large volumes of samples with large language models (LLMs) can be computationally and financially costly in industry and real-world use. We propose batch prompting, a simple yet effective prompting approach that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Zhoujun Cheng , Jungo Kasai , Tao Yu

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI, demonstrating unprecedented capacity across various tasks. However, the inference process for LLMs comes with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Zangwei Zheng , Xiaozhe Ren , Fuzhao Xue , Yang Luo , Xin Jiang , Yang You

Reducing serving cost and latency is a fundamental concern for the deployment of language models (LMs) in business applications. To address this, cascades of LMs offer an effective solution that conditionally employ smaller models for…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce fluent but factually incorrect responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Abstention, where the model chooses not to answer and instead outputs phrases such as "I don't know", is a common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vy Nguyen , Ziqi Xu , Jeffrey Chan , Estrid He , Feng Xia , Xiuzhen Zhang

Standard LLM cascades improve efficiency by deferring difficult queries from weak to strong models. However, these systems are typically static: when faced with repeated or semantically similar queries, they redundantly consult the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yu Wu , Shuo Wu , Ye Tao , Yansong Li , Anand D. Sarwate

Abstention Ability (AA) is a critical aspect of Large Language Model (LLM) reliability, referring to an LLM's capability to withhold responses when uncertain or lacking a definitive answer, without compromising performance. Although…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Nishanth Madhusudhan , Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan , Vikas Yadav , Masoud Hashemi

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

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved code completion tasks, yet the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost remains a critical challenge. While using larger models and incorporating…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Boyuan Chen , Mingzhi Zhu , Brendan Dolan-Gavitt , Muhammad Shafique , Siddharth Garg

Mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their reliable deployment. Existing methods typically fine-tune LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge scope. However, these methods often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Hao An , Yang Xu
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