Knowing When Not to Answer: Pseudo-Ensembles for Abstention in Music Audio-Language Models
Music audio-language models are evaluated almost entirely by accuracy on multiple-choice questions. This protocol forces the model to commit to an option, so a lucky guess looks the same as real musical understanding. What is missing is a way to tell when the model does not know the answer, so that it can abstain instead of guessing. The usual solution, an ensemble of independently trained models, is far too expensive here, which leaves the entropy of a single predictive distribution as the only available confidence signal. We instead build pseudo-ensembles from one pretrained model by perturbing its input in ways that cannot change the correct answer, then averaging the resulting distrib...
| Authors | Aanya Maheshwari, Vatsal Raina |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.