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AFRL Technical Report · 2025

Selective LLM Training with Reject Options

N. Kashani Motlagh, T. Anderson, M. Scherreik

8× OOD utility

We extend our selective prediction research to large language models by training an abstention head alongside the base instruction-tuned transformer. The approach injects curriculum-learned outlier prompts and policy gradients so that routing decisions stay calibrated, improving downstream analyst-facing utility by on held-out OOD evaluations. The report shares the evaluation harness and discusses how to wire the policy into production command-and-control systems.

Highlights

  • Reject-option heads act as a triage layer for routing prompts to humans or fallback chains.
  • Curriculum mixes synthetic outliers with frontier eval suites to maintain calibrated abstentions.

Artifacts & reproduction

Evaluation harness for multimodal MT, selective LLM routing, and visual-text calibration experiments.

  • Run imagery-aware contrastive probes against WMT-style checkpoints.
  • Benchmark LLM reject-option heads on held-out OOD prompts.
  • Log structured reports (HTML/Markdown) for rapid model comparisons.
  • Used to benchmark LLM reject-option heads and multimodal MT models for AFRL and academic deployments.