SIEVES: Selective Prediction Generalizes through Visual Evidence Scoring

Abstract: Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) achieve ever-stronger performance on visual-language tasks. Even as traditional visual question answering benchmarks approach saturation, reliable deployment requires satisfying low error tolerances in real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Precisely, selective prediction aims to improve coverage, i.e. the share of inputs the system answers, while adhering to a user-defined risk level. This is typically achieved by assigning a confidence score to each answer and abstaining on those that fall below a certain threshold. To enable reliable generalization, we require reasoner models to produce localized visual evidence while answering, and design a selector that explicitly learns to estimate the quality of the localization provided by the reasoner. We show that SIEVES (Selective Prediction through Visual Evidence Scoring) improves coverage by up to three times on challenging OOD benchmarks (V* Bench, HR-Bench-8k, MME-RealWorld-Lite, VizWiz, and AdVQA), compared to non-grounding baselines. Beyond better generalization to OOD tasks, the design of the SIEVES selector enables transfer to proprietary reasoners without access to their weights or logits, such as o3 and Gemini-3-Pro, providing coverage boosts beyond those attributable to accuracy alone. We highlight that SIEVES generalizes across all five tested OOD datasets and reasoner models (Pixel-Reasoner, o3, and Gemini-3-Pro), without benchmark- or reasoner-specific training or adaptation.