The paper introduces Neighborhood Elites (NE), a quality‑diversity search method for generating answer‑preserving rewrites in question answering. NE explicitly controls two dimensions—type of edit and explicitness of support—to create diverse perturbations that improve uncertainty quantification. Across five extractive‑QA datasets and five instruction‑tuned LLMs, NE outperforms other constructors, achieving higher AUROC and AUPRC scores and surpassing semantic entropy baselines.
By Mesut Ceylan, Arda Baris Basaran, Elgar Fleisch, Filipe Barata
The paper introduces Drift-Constrained Optimization (DCO), a framework that treats behavioral drift during fine‑tuning of instruction models as a bounded constraint rather than an uncontrolled side effect. By defining a drift budget, the authors reformulate fine‑tuning as a direction‑selection problem, showing that choosing different update directions can qualitatively change outcomes. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate that carefully selected directions improve scientific reasoning and multilingual translation while preserving reasoning capabilities and general performance.
By Fei Yuan, Changjiang Gao, Yilei Tu, Yifeng Liu, Shujian Huang, Yu Qiao
arXiv:2608. 15445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a reward is correct on every training example yet consistent with more than one goal, a model can acquire an unintended one, a failure known as goal misgeneralization.
By Suyash Maniyar, Armaan Sandhu, Abhishek Mishra
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.
By Chandan Kumar Sah, Xiaoli Lian, Li Zhang
Almost every large language model that reaches a broad audience is quantized: trained in full precision, then compressed for efficiency. This step is assumed harmless and its safety is rarely re-checked.
arXiv:2610.03551v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have reached expert-level performance on competition mathematics largely through the volume of search placed around them:...
By Yanli Wang, Suijin Wang, Xiaopeng Yuan, Haohan Wang
arXiv:2608. 11138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose that a model's uncertainty about a token is reflected not only in the breadth of its output distribution but also in whether a confident prediction is \emph{fragile} under perturbation of its attention pathways.
By Minsoo Kim, Sungyoung Ji, Kisung Moon, Ilyong Yoon
arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.
By Po-Jen Ko, Che-Cheng Wu, Hung-Chun Hsu, Li-Yang Chang, Chuan-Ju Wang
Large language models are informing decisions with ever-higher stakes. As the consequences of their errors grow, a central question becomes harder to ignore: how much can we trust an individual answer...
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled sophisticated reasoning and content generation, yet their inherent stochasticity poses significant challenges for ensuring predictive credibility. While traditional uncertainty taxonomy paradigms, such as the dichotomy of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, provide conceptual foundations, they often fail to capture the multi-component and multi-stage nature of LLM generation and struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods.
Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation. We investigate whether verbalized confidence from black-box language models can serve as an actionable signal for retrieval routing.
arXiv:2608. 11922v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy is a strong answer-selection rule in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for question answering: across five QA benchmarks, selecting the answer a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean $F_1$ from 0.
By Hung-Chun Hsu, Po-Jen Ko, Che-Cheng Wu, Li-Yang Chang, Chuan-Ju Wang