mallen-2023-retrieval-decision-from-question-alone

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/mallen-2023-when-not-to-trust-s1-introduction.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:10+00:00

In Mallen et al. 2023, the decision to trigger retrieval can be made from the question alone (subject entity popularity) without requiring a model-internal confidence score.

Summary

You can tell whether to look up outside information just by examining what the question is about, specifically whether the subject is a well-known or obscure entity, without needing to peek inside the model to gauge its own confidence. This keeps the retrieval trigger simple and cheap to compute, since it relies on an easy surface-level feature of the input rather than expensive internal model signals.