# Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11689 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11689/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [Selective Classification for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08500/) (2017)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07042/) (2018)
- [How Can We Know When Language Models Know? On the Calibration of Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00955/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [Prompting GPT-3 To Be Reliable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09150/) (2022)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection and Selective Generation for Conditional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15558/) (2022)
- [Planning with Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05510/) (2023)
- [Investigating Selective Prediction Approaches Across Several Tasks in IID, OOD, and Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00211/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05579/) (2024)
- [Know Your Limits: A Survey of Abstention in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18418/) (2024)
- [Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09267/) (2024)
- [Conformal Alignment: Knowing When to Trust Foundation Models with Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10301/) (2024)
- [SETS: Leveraging Self-Verification and Self-Correction for Improved Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19306/) (2025)
- [Effective Large Language Model Adaptation for Improved Grounding and Citation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09533/) (2023)
- [InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12053/) (2024)
- [A Survey on the Honesty of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18786/) (2024)
- [Eliciting Language Model Behaviors with Investigator Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01236/) (2025)
- [From Calibration to Collaboration: LLM Uncertainty Quantification Should Be More Human-Centered](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07461/) (2025)
- [Perception of Knowledge Boundary for Large Language Models through Semi-open-ended Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14383/) (2024)
- [Grounding and Evaluation for Large Language Models: Practical Challenges and Lessons Learned (Survey)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12858/) (2024)
- [Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04695/) (2024)
- [Trustworthy and Practical AI for Healthcare: A Guided Deferral System with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07212/) (2024)
- [Teaching LLMs to Abstain across Languages via Multilingual Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15948/) (2024)
- [SCOPE: Selective Conformal Optimized Pairwise LLM Judging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13110/) (2026)
- [Calibrated Decisions at Scale: Converting Police Crash Narratives into Probabilistic Crash Variables with a System One Model (Jev)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24052/) (2026)
- [LLMs' Reading Comprehension Is Affected by Parametric Knowledge and Struggles with Hypothetical Statements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06283/) (2024)
- [Overview of the EHRSQL 2024 Shared Task on Reliable Text-to-SQL Modeling on Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06673/) (2024)
- [Attribute or Abstain: Large Language Models as Long Document Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07799/) (2024)
- [The Confidence Paradox: Can LLM Know When It's Wrong](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23464/) (2025)
- [WebDevJudge: Evaluating (M)LLMs as Critiques for Web Development Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18560/) (2025)
- [Enabling Weak LLMs to Judge Response Reliability via Meta Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12146/) (2024)
- [SUGAR: Leveraging Contextual Confidence for Smarter Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04899/) (2025)
- [Line of Duty: Evaluating LLM Self-Knowledge via Consistency in Feasibility Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11256/) (2025)
- [Loki's Dance of Illusions: A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02870/) (2025)
- [On Calibration of Large Language Models: From Response To Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13540/) (2026)
- [The Consistency Hypothesis in Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21849/) (2025)
- [Efficiently Deploying LLMs with Controlled Risk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02173/) (2024)
- [Bottom-Up Synthesis of Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogues with Iteratively Self-Refined Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14375/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great advances in a variety of tasks, including natural language understanding and generation. However, their use in high-stakes decision-making scenarios is still limited due to the potential for errors. Selective prediction is a technique that can be used to improve the reliability of the LLMs by allowing them to abstain from making predictions when they are unsure of the answer. In this work, we propose a novel framework for adaptation with self-evaluation to improve the selective prediction performance of LLMs. Our framework is based on the idea of using parameter-efficient tuning to adapt the LLM to the specific task at hand while improving its ability to perform self-evaluation. We evaluate our method on a variety of question-answering (QA) datasets and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art selective prediction methods. For example, on the CoQA benchmark, our method improves the AUACC from 91.23% to 92.63% and improves the AUROC from 74.61% to 80.25%.