arXiv:2607. 03882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as post-hoc explainers of AI-generated outputs, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably communicate probabilistic information in natural language.
As the chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities of large language models improve, evaluating and calibrating their reasoning confidence is becoming increasingly important for quantifying the uncertaint...
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs.
arXiv:2609.34187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The strong version of the stochastic parrot argument claims that, although large language models (LLMs) may exceed rote regurgitation, they c...
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:2609.22206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks, yet understanding and quantify...
The paper investigates the relationship between a large language model’s internal probability distribution and its verbalized confidence statements. By systematically manipulating training and in‑context data, the authors show that both internal and verbalized probabilities are influenced by distributional and asserted uncertainty in the data. They find that verbalized probabilities align with internal ones beyond what would be expected if they tracked the same sources independently, indicating that verbalized confidence can serve as a probe of the model’s internal distribution.
arXiv:2607. 18454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the risk of rare failures in language models, such as those triggered by adversarial distribution shifts or very large-scale deployments, requires estimating probabilities far too small for random sampling.
arXiv:2608. 19323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2609.10122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a broad range of classification settings, yet the reliability of their predictions...
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.