# Auditable Decision Models with Learned Abstention and Real-Time Steering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27768 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27768/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Selective Classification for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08500/) (2017)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [TweetEval: Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12421/) (2020)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [Good Debt or Bad Debt: Detecting Semantic Orientations in Economic Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1307.5336/) (2013)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 4: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00741/) (2019)
- [Optimal strategies for reject option classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12523/) (2021)
- [NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17008/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Production AI systems often operate with incomplete, conflicting, or insufficient evidence. Forced classifiers collapse such cases into action labels, while generative systems can produce outputs that are difficult to interpret as auditable execution decisions. We study operational decision control for AI systems, where uncertainty must be explicitly routable, policy-governed, and auditable rather than hidden inside forced predictions or free-form generation. We present EvaluatorDPT, a bounded decision-control model that predicts YES, NO, or TBD, where TBD is learned as a deferral outcome rather than added only as a post-hoc confidence rule. The model uses a transformer encoder with a primary bounded-decision head and structured auxiliary channels for values and emotions/sentiments. The interface is domain-agnostic in form: a deployment domain supplies evidence and policy thresholds, while the model emits a bounded distribution that can be controlled at inference time through recorded operating thresholds and, when validated, auxiliary semantic signals. For the evaluated model version, we report decision performance on held-out validation and test splits; auxiliary emotion metrics are omitted because the emotion head is disabled for this evaluation. On the held-out test split (n=44,597), the model achieves Accuracy = 0.8260 and Macro F1 = 0.8252, with per-class F1 of 0.8314 (YES), 0.8486 (NO), and 0.7956 (TBD). The evaluation record also includes calibration evidence (ECE = 0.0338 on validation), threshold-sweep outputs, multi-seed stability checks, confusion matrices, and reproducibility commands. Our main contribution is a bounded execution interface in which deferral is learned, inference-time routing remains inspectable, auxiliary signals provide a path to auditable behavior control, and evaluation evidence supports external review.