$ECUAS_n$: A family of metrics for principled evaluation of uncertainty-augmented systems
Authors: Lautaro Estienne, Erik Ernst, Mat'ias Vera et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 20490v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: In high-stakes automated decision-making, access to predictive uncertainty is essential for enabling users -- human or downstream systems -- to accept or reject predictions based on application-specific cost trade-offs.
Relevance
Read next because $ECUAS_n$: A family of metrics for principled evaluation of uncertainty-augmented systems overlaps with clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)", clean result "Coupling evil personas with wrong answers fails to protect Qwen2.5-7B from EM-induced alignment collapse — and the apparent capability ordering across coupling conditions is mostly eval contamination (LOW confidence)". Matching terms: class, rect, under, correct, eval, rate, control. Source: arxiv cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)": this item discusses evaluation.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.20490v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: In high-stakes automated decision-making, access to predictive uncertainty is essential for enabling users -- human or downstream systems -- to accept or reject predictions based on application-specific cost trade-offs. Such uncertainty-augmented (UA) systems -- i.e., systems that output both predictions and uncertainty scores -- are currently being assessed in the literature in a variety of ways, using separate metrics to evaluate the predictions and the uncertainty scores, setting a cost function with a fixed rejection cost or integrating over a coverage-risk curve. We argue that these evaluation approaches are inadequate for assessing overall performance of the UA system for decision making under uncertainty and propose a novel family of metrics, $ECUAS_n$, formulated as proper scoring rules for the task of interest. The parameter $n$ controls the trade-off between the cost of incorrect predictions and imperfect uncertainties depending on the needs of the use-case. We demonstrate the advantages of the $ECUAS_n$ metrics both theoretically and empirically, through experiments on diverse classification and generation datasets, including a manually annotated subset of TriviaQA.