Budgeted Multiple-Expert Deferral

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: DeSalvo, Giulia, Mohri, Clara, Mohri, Mehryar, Zhong, Yutao
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author DeSalvo, Giulia
Mohri, Clara
Mohri, Mehryar
Zhong, Yutao
author_facet DeSalvo, Giulia
Mohri, Clara
Mohri, Mehryar
Zhong, Yutao
contents Learning to defer uncertain predictions to costly experts offers a powerful strategy for improving the accuracy and efficiency of machine learning systems. However, standard training procedures for deferral algorithms typically require querying all experts for every training instance, an approach that becomes prohibitively expensive when expert queries incur significant computational or resource costs. This undermines the core goal of deferral: to limit unnecessary expert usage. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the budgeted deferral framework, which aims to train effective deferral algorithms while minimizing expert query costs during training. We propose new algorithms for both two-stage and single-stage multiple-expert deferral settings that selectively query only a subset of experts per training example. While inspired by active learning, our setting is fundamentally different: labels are already known, and the core challenge is to decide which experts to query in order to balance cost and predictive performance. We establish theoretical guarantees for both of our algorithms, including generalization bounds and label complexity analyses. Empirical results across several domains show that our algorithms substantially reduce training costs without sacrificing prediction accuracy, demonstrating the practical value of our budget-aware deferral algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26706
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Budgeted Multiple-Expert Deferral
DeSalvo, Giulia
Mohri, Clara
Mohri, Mehryar
Zhong, Yutao
Machine Learning
Learning to defer uncertain predictions to costly experts offers a powerful strategy for improving the accuracy and efficiency of machine learning systems. However, standard training procedures for deferral algorithms typically require querying all experts for every training instance, an approach that becomes prohibitively expensive when expert queries incur significant computational or resource costs. This undermines the core goal of deferral: to limit unnecessary expert usage. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the budgeted deferral framework, which aims to train effective deferral algorithms while minimizing expert query costs during training. We propose new algorithms for both two-stage and single-stage multiple-expert deferral settings that selectively query only a subset of experts per training example. While inspired by active learning, our setting is fundamentally different: labels are already known, and the core challenge is to decide which experts to query in order to balance cost and predictive performance. We establish theoretical guarantees for both of our algorithms, including generalization bounds and label complexity analyses. Empirical results across several domains show that our algorithms substantially reduce training costs without sacrificing prediction accuracy, demonstrating the practical value of our budget-aware deferral algorithms.
title Budgeted Multiple-Expert Deferral
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26706