# Calibration and Risk-Budgeted Decisions with System One Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19811/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Selective Classification for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08500/) (2017)
- [Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14975/) (2023)
- [WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18495/) (2024)
- [Measuring Calibration in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01685/) (2019)
- [How Can We Know When Language Models Know? On the Calibration of Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00955/) (2020)
- [SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07180/) (2020)
- [Distribution-Free, Risk-Controlling Prediction Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02703/) (2021)
- [Learn then Test: Calibrating Predictive Algorithms to Achieve Risk Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01052/) (2021)
- [Qwen3Guard Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14276/) (2025)
- [AEGIS: Online Adaptive AI Content Safety Moderation with Ensemble of LLM Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05993/) (2024)
- [ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02022/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Posterior Probabilities: Decision Theory, Proper Scoring Rules, and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02841/) (2024)
- [Beyond Calibration: Do a Typed-Decision Model's Probabilities Obey the Probability Axioms?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33209/) (2026)
- [Towards Detecting Contextual Real-Time Toxicity for In-Game Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18330/) (2023)
- [Safety-Flag: A Unified Benchmark for the Reliability and Calibration of LLM Content Moderators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19072/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM workflows and agents rely on a set of binary decisions like allow/block an input, or discard/retain a retrieved document. When human deferral is unavailable, uncertain cases must still receive an action. We study System One decision scores in this setting by defaulting to a conservative fallback when uncertain, and controlling the false omission risk within the subset of inputs assigned the utility-maximizing action. Across six datasets covering moderation, safety, and reranking, we compare general System One models with task baselines and a local open-weights fine-tuned System One model. We show that naive baselines for threshold selection exceed the target risk in roughly half of settings with defined test risk, compared with 7.8% for Learn Then Test (LTT), which leverages finite-sample statistical guarantees. Our results show why relying on a probability-like interface is insufficient for deployment decisions and how risk-budgeted selection trades useful action against observed error.