Selective Classification Can Magnify Disparities Across Groups

Selective classification, where models are allowed to “abstain” when they are uncertain about a prediction, is a useful approach for deploying models in settings where errors are costly. For example, in medicine, model errors can have life-or-death ramifications, but abstentions can be easily handled by backing off to a doctor, who then makes a diagnosis. Across a range of applications from vision 1 2 3 and NLP 4 5 , even simple selective classifiers, relying only on model logits, routinely and