collaborators

6 papers

cs.LG2026

When Can Conformal Risk Control Certify LLM Outputs? Bounds, Impossibility, and Adaptation for Structured Generation

Varun Kotte

Large language models (LLMs) deployed for structured generation (NER, JSON extraction, QA, and classification) lack formal reliability guarantees, and standard heuristic abstention…

cs.CY2026

Two Wrongs, No Right: Auditing Social-Desirability Bias in LLM Annotators for Computational Social Science

Varun Kotte

LLM annotators are increasingly used in computational social science (CSS), but it is unclear whether their alignment-shaped errors preserve the empirical conclusions a researcher…

cs.LG2026

PASC: Pipeline-Aware Conformal Prediction with Joint Coverage Guarantees for Multi-Stage NLP and LLM Pipelines

Varun Kotte

Modern NLP and LLM systems are pipelines: named entity recognition (NER) -> entity disambiguation (NED) -> entity typing, retrieval-augmented generation (retriever -> reader), and…

cs.LG2026

UCCI: Calibrated Uncertainty for Cost-Optimal LLM Cascade Routing

Varun Kotte

LLM cascades and model routing promise lower inference cost by sending easy queries to a small model and escalating hard ones to a large model, but most deployed routers use uncali…

cs.IR2026

Not All Queries Need Rewriting: When Prompt-Only LLM Refinement Helps and Hurts Dense Retrieval

Varun Kotte

Prompt-only, single-step LLM query rewriting, where a rewrite is generated from the query alone without retrieval feedback, is commonly used in production RAG pipelines, but its ef…

cs.LG2026

PromptPort: A Reliability Layer for Cross-Model Structured Extraction

Varun Kotte

Structured extraction with LLMs fails in production not because models lack understanding, but because output formatting is unreliable across models and prompts. A prompt that retu…