arXiv:2602. 11908v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLMs are widely used, yet they remain prone to factual errors that erode user trust and limit adoption in high-risk settings.
By Shani Goren, Ido Galil, Ran El-Yaniv
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
arXiv:2608.22483v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly support decision-making in high-stakes domains, but they often hallucinate and express confidence that is mis...
By Toghrul Abbasli, Kentaroh Toyoda, Yuan Wang, Li Chen
arXiv:2604.08974v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification techniques measure confidence in language model outputs to support critical applications like hallucination detection an...
By Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Cesare Spinoso di-Piano, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
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.
Uncertainty estimation is essential not only for the trustworthy deployment of large language models (LLMs) but also as a foundation for self-refinement in LLM generation. However, existing approaches operate at suboptimal granularities: token-level scores lack semantic coherence, while sequence-level scores fail to localize errors.
arXiv:2606. 07822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential.
By Nishant Subramani, Palash Goyal, Yiwen Song, Mani Malek, Yuan Xue, Tomas Pfister, Hamid Palangi
arXiv:2509.24988v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Generating accurate and calibrated confidence estimates is critical for deploying LLMs in high-stakes or user-facing applications, and remain...
By Hanqi Xiao, Vaidehi Patil, Hyunji Lee, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2509. 25459v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in generating long-form scientific explanations that synthesize evidence and connect multiple factors.
By Haozhou Xu, Dongxia Wu, Matteo Chinazzi, Ruijia Niu, Rose Yu, Yi-An Ma
arXiv:2607. 07626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable confidence estimation is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in confidence-aware systems, where downstream decisions such as retrieval, tool use, and adaptive computation depend on accurately estimating answer reliability.
By Sahil Kale
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
The paper introduces Label-Confidence-Aware Uncertainty Quantification (LCA-UQ), a method that uses Pointwise Kullback-Leibler divergence to align global entropy from multiple stochastic samples with the local confidence of a candidate answer. By bridging this gap, LCA-UQ improves the reliability and stability of uncertainty assessments in natural language generation. Experiments on popular LLMs and NLP datasets show that label sources significantly influence classification and that LCA-UQ outperforms existing uncertainty estimation approaches.
By Qinhong Lin, Yinglun Feng, Yuhao Zhang, Zhongliang Yang, Linna Zhou