aiqbench analysis
The paper treats LLMs used as classifiers as deployed decision systems and proposes a pipeline for abstention, drift and label-shift detection, and gated model updates. Results are mixed: calibration error drops under shift, and a learned uncertainty score with certified thresholds beats max-probability and conformal baselines on risk-target violations, but the conservative update gate trails baselines on the larger Qwen3-4B. Readers should weigh the modest benchmark (ten shifted environments, three seeds, three models) before generalizing.
SHIFT-JEV: Certified Abstention and Gain-Gated Continual Adaptation for LLM-Based Decision Models under Distribution Shift
arXiv:2610.34329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can act as decision models that return a probability distribution over a fixed set of options, but deployed decision models face domain, label-prior, emerging-class and candidate-set shift. We study how such models fail under shift and propose SHIFT-Jev, a monitoring, abstention and continual-adaptation procedure for them. It scores the risk of each decision from uncertainty, format and option-consistency signals, certifies abstention thresholds with Learn-then-Test, monitors the decision stream with drift and label-shift detectors, and accepts a model update only when an expected-gain gate finds a significant held-out improvement without loss on earlier regimes. On a benchmark of ten shifted test environments with Qwen3-0.6B and Qwen3-4B (three seeds each) and Phi-4-mini, fine-tuning with KL anchors and temperature scaling lowers calibration error under shift from 0.289 to 0.087. At a target risk of 10%, a learned uncertainty score with a certified threshold exceeds the target in 3 to 5 of 27 environment-seed tests, against 5 to 15 for a max-probability score with the same certification and 9 to 14 for conformal prediction sets; drift-based routing changes little. A chi-squared test on predicted labels detects 95 to 99% of class-prior shifts that confidence- and embedding-based detectors miss. In continual adaptation, SHIFT-Jev reaches 70.5% accuracy on Qwen3-0.6B, above replay, LwF, EWC and fine-tuning baselines in every seed, whereas on Qwen3-4B its conservative gate leaves it 0.4 to 1.4 points behind them.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) can act as decision models that return a probability distribution over a fixed set of options, but deployed decision models face domain, label-prior, emerging-class and candidate-set shift. We study how such models fail under shift and propose SHIFT-Jev, a monitoring, abstention and continual-adaptation procedure for them. It scores the risk of each decision from uncertainty, format and option-consistency signals, certifies abstention thresholds with Learn-then-Test, monitors the decision stream with drift and label-shift detectors, and accepts a model update only when an expected-gain gate finds a significant held-out improvement without loss on earlier regimes. On a benchmark of ten shifted test environments with Qwen3-0.6B and Qwen3-4B (three seeds each) and Phi-4-mini, fine-tuning with KL anchors and temperature scaling lowers calibration error under shift from 0.289 to 0.087. At a target risk of 10%, a learned uncertainty score with a certified threshold exceeds the target in 3 to 5 of 27 environment-seed tests, against 5 to 15 for a max-probability score with the same certification and 9 to 14 for conformal prediction sets; drift-based routing changes little. A chi-squared test on predicted labels detects 95 to 99% of class-prior shifts that confidence- and embedding-based detectors miss. In continual adaptation, SHIFT-Jev reaches 70.5% accuracy on Qwen3-0.6B, above replay, LwF, EWC and fine-tuning baselines in every seed, whereas on Qwen3-4B its conservative gate leaves it 0.4 to 1.4 points behind them.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.34329 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.34329v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.34329 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 328 words
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