When No-Rejection Learning is Optimal for Regression with Rejection

Learning with rejection is a prototypical model for studying the interaction between humans and AI on prediction tasks. The model has two components, a predictor and a rejector. Upon the arrival of a sample, the rejector first decides whether to accept it; if accepted, the predictor fulfills the prediction task, and if rejected, the prediction will be deferred to humans. The learning problem requires learning a predictor and a rejector simultaneously. This changes the structure of the conventional loss function and often results in non-convexity and inconsistency issues. For the classification with rejection problem, several works develop surrogate losses for the jointly learning with provable consistency guarantees; in parallel, there has been less work for the regression counterpart. We study the regression with rejection (RwR) problem and investigate the no-rejection learning strategy which treats the RwR problem as a standard regression task to learn the predictor. We establish that the suboptimality of the no-rejection learning strategy observed in the literature can be mitigated by enlarging the function class of the predictor. Then we introduce the truncated loss to single out the learning for the predictor and we show that a consistent surrogate property can be established for the predictor individually in an easier way than for the predictor and the rejector jointly. Our findings advocate for a two-step learning procedure that first uses all the data to learn the predictor and then calibrates the prediction loss for the rejector. It is better aligned with the common intuition that more data samples will lead to a better predictor and it calls for more efforts on a better design of calibration algorithms for learning the rejector. While our discussions mainly focus on the regression problem, the theoretical results and insights generalize to the classification problem as well.