arXiv AI

Estimating Uncertainty from Reasoning: A Large-Scale Study of Multi- and Crosslingual MCQA Performance in LLMs

arXiv:2607. 06327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty estimation (UE) enables LLM-powered systems to recognize when to abstain, yet existing research has predominantly focused on English.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Rethinking the Multilingual Reasoning Gap with Layer Swap

The study investigates the performance gap between native-language reasoning and English-pivoted reasoning in large language models. By creating extensive multilingual reasoning datasets and fine‑tuning specialists on Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base, the authors find that the native reasoning gap is much smaller (1.9–3.5%) than previously reported. They analyze weight‑space changes, discover a language‑agnostic reasoning core in the middle layers, and propose a Layer Swap technique that transfers these mid‑layer updates from an English specialist to native specialists, effectively closing most of the gap while maintaining native chain‑of‑thought output.

By Maxence Lasbordes, Am\'elie Chatelain, Djam\'e Seddah
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Choosing the Right Language Mode at Inference Time for Multilingual Reliability

The paper investigates how multilingual large language models can be guided to reason more reliably in low- to mid-resource languages by selecting appropriate language modes during inference. Experiments with LLaMA and Qwen models show that using English context can correct errors from non‑English comprehension, but adding redundant bilingual context can cause interference. To balance this trade‑off, the authors propose Reliability‑Aware Adaptive Inference (RAAI), a training‑free test‑time framework that routes prompts based on Expected Calibration Error and gates reasoning with a mid‑layer Risk Index, achieving up to 37.7% accuracy gains and reduced calibration error on low‑resource languages.

By Ekata Mitra, Ameeta Agrawal
arXiv AI
4d ago

Probability is Not Enough: Exploring and Counting Divergent Tokens for Reasoning Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs

The paper introduces Divergent Token Confidence (DTC), a method that estimates large language model confidence by counting tokens where two models strongly disagree during decoding. DTC uses Jensen-Shannon divergence between next-token distributions along the same reasoning trajectory and shows a near-negative correlation with answer accuracy. Experiments on multiple model families and six mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that DTC improves calibration over traditional probability-based and verbalized baselines, achieving lower expected calibration errors in both white-box and black-box settings.

By Feiyang Li, Shengjing Liu, Qi Zhan, Sijie Cheng, Weiqing Wang, Hongwen Chen, Yuxuan Yang, Wen Wang, Yile Wang, Hui Huang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

The Origins of Stochasticity: Comprehensive Investigations on Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Building Multilingual Bridges: Data Mixing as the Pillar of Generalization for In-Language Reasoning

arXiv:2609.10445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models have made substantial advances on a variety of complex tasks, yet their capabilities remain overwhelmingly English-centric: m...

By Mehrnaz Mofakhami, Ananya Sahu, Alejandro R. Salamanca, Daniel D'souza, Alexandre Berard, Thomas Euyang, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer
arXiv AI
Jul 8

PluraMath: Extending Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation Beyond High-Resource Languages

arXiv:2607. 05992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mathematical reasoning has become a central task for evaluating and tuning reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing benchmarks remain heavily biased toward high-resource languages, with English and Chinese dominating both pre-training corpora and evaluation suites.

By Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Kathy H\"ammerl, Ilseyar Alimova, Jind\v{r}ich Libovick\'y, Shu Okabe, Miras Baisbay, Lukas Edman, Abrorkhon Inomkhujaev, Antonia Karamolegkou, Mateusz Lango, Volkan \"Ozer, Nikola Selic, Subhankar Swain, Tsedeniya Kinfe Temesgen, Galit Bary Weisberg, Alexander Fraser
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Semantic Calibration Prevails Where Token Confidence Fails: Benchmarking Long-Form Scientific QA

The paper presents the first large‑scale benchmark for uncertainty quantification (UQ) calibration in long‑form scientific question answering, evaluating four UQ methods on 685,000 responses from up to 20 large language models across seven datasets. It shows that instruction tuning leads to token‑level probability polarization, undermining token‑level uncertainty signals, while reasoning model families differ in how they handle this effect. Only semantic consistency—consistency of the final answer—provides well‑calibrated outputs, demonstrating that semantic calibration remains robust in multi‑step, dependency‑rich reasoning.

By Philip M\"uller, Nicholas Popovi\v{c}, Michael F\"arber, Peter Steinbach