# SelectiveNet: A Deep Neural Network with an Integrated Reject Option

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09192 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09192/

## Key facts

- Cited by 350 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 350)

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- [DICE: Leveraging Sparsification for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09805/) (2021)
- [Non-Parametric Outlier Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02966/) (2023)
- [Machine Learning with a Reject Option: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11277/) (2021)
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- [On the Relation between Sensitivity and Accuracy in In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07661/) (2022)
- [Investigating Selective Prediction Approaches Across Several Tasks in IID, OOD, and Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00211/) (2022)
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- [A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Failure Detection in Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15259/) (2022)
- [Open-environment Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00423/) (2022)
- [Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11516/) (2026)
- [Principled Approaches for Learning to Defer with Multiple Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14774/) (2023)
- [Overcoming Common Flaws in the Evaluation of Selective Classification Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01032/) (2024)
- [Nonparametric Uncertainty Quantification for Single Deterministic Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03101/) (2022)
- [Predictor-Rejector Multi-Class Abstention: Theoretical Analysis and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14772/) (2023)
- [How Does Unlabeled Data Provably Help Out-of-Distribution Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03502/) (2024)
- [What Can We Learn From The Selective Prediction And Uncertainty Estimation Performance Of 523 Imagenet Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11874/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of selective prediction (also known as reject option) in deep neural networks, and introduce SelectiveNet, a deep neural architecture with an integrated reject option. Existing rejection mechanisms are based mostly on a threshold over the prediction confidence of a pre-trained network. In contrast, SelectiveNet is trained to optimize both classification (or regression) and rejection simultaneously, end-to-end. The result is a deep neural network that is optimized over the covered domain. In our experiments, we show a consistently improved risk-coverage trade-off over several well-known classification and regression datasets, thus reaching new state-of-the-art results for deep selective classification.
