arXiv:2606. 19559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building.
By Gregory Matsnev
arXiv:2609.37588v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Users of language-based assistive agents often make ambiguous requests. In response, an assistant can either directly act on its interpretation of the...
By T. Duy Nguyen-Hien, Yee Whye Teh, Wee Sun Lee, Tan Zhi-Xuan
Users of language-based assistive agents often make ambiguous requests. In response, an assistant can either directly act on its interpretation of the request --- risking misalignment with the user --...
arXiv:2609.24290v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Instruction-tuned LLMs faced with underspecified queries often commit to a single interpretation rather than ask for clarification, producing confident...
By Yunxiang Li, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng
The paper challenges the common practice of estimating aleatoric uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple clarified inputs and comparing the resulting answers. It argues that answers are unnecessary, costly, and can introduce epistemic leakage, proposing instead a clarification-only method that directly assesses ambiguity from the space of plausible interpretations. Experiments on three benchmarks show the new approach improves AUROC, reduces computational cost, and yields uncertainty estimates less correlated with epistemic uncertainty.
By Omer Nahum, Niv Nayman, Jonathan Fhima, Alon Zolfi, Jeremy Levy, Shai Mazor, Paolo Favaro
arXiv:2607. 21143v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ambiguous user requests make clarification a sequential decision problem for conversational LLM assistants: they must decide whether to ask, what to ask, when to stop, and when to answer.
By Minh Ngoc Ta, My Anh Tran Nguyen, Duong D. Nguyen, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive systems where understanding user intent precisely is paramount. A key capability for such systems is effective question clarificat...
arXiv:2607. 02686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning agents operating under partial observability must act on incomplete information, making them natural candidates for guidance from small language models (SLMs) that carry broad reasoning priors.
By Juarez Monteiro, Nathan Gavenski, Guilherme Lima, Francisco Galuppo, Odinaldo Rodrigues, Adriano Veloso
The paper presents a tri‑agent framework for evaluating large language models’ question‑clarification abilities. It involves a Question Clarifying Agent that identifies ambiguities and asks follow‑up questions, a Respondent Agent that simulates human replies, and an Evaluator Agent that judges the dialogue using metrics such as ambiguity handling, question quality, dialogue efficiency, language appropriateness, and intent alignment. The authors illustrate the approach with synthetic supply‑chain data and discuss validating the evaluator against human judgments.
By Yikai Zhao, Saurabh Pandey, Pradeep Kumar Misra
arXiv:2608. 11631v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In open-domain human-computer interaction scenarios, large language models (LLMs) frequently encounter user queries that are ambiguous or incomplete.
By Kuangzhao Yang, Ziliang Zhao, Zhicheng Dou
arXiv:2605.25831v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling...
By Joris Baan, Wilker Aziz, Barbara Plank, Raquel Fern\'andez
arXiv:2606. 02871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models improve performance by generating extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but this behavior becomes inefficient when applied to LLM agents.
By Dongwon Jung, Peng Shi, Yi Zhang, Junshan Zhang, Muhao Chen