Selective Risk Certification for LLM Outputs via Information-Lift Statistics: PAC-Bayes, Robustness, and Skeleton Design

Abstract: LLMs often produce plausible but incorrect outputs. Existing heuristics such as HallBayes lack formal guarantees. We develop the first comprehensive theory of \emph{information-lift certificates} under selective classification. Our contributions are: (i) a PAC-Bayes \emph{sub-gamma} analysis extending beyond standard Bernstein bounds; (ii) explicit skeleton sensitivity theorems quantifying robustness to misspecification; (iii) failure-mode guarantees under assumption violations; and (iv) a principled variational method for skeleton construction. Across six datasets and multiple model families, we validate assumptions empirically, reduce abstention by 12--15\% at the same risk, and maintain runtime overhead below 20\% (further reduced via batching).