Maximally Helpful, Appropriately Honest: Abstention as a Spectrum

Most abstention work treats 'should the model answer?' as a binary. We argue that's the wrong frame: an underspecified question wants clarification, a false-premise question wants correction, a time-sensitive one wants verification guidance — not the same generic 'I don't know'. We introduce the Helpful Abstention framework, a judge-based helpfulness × honesty (HH) evaluation across 15 open and 4…