arXiv Machine Learning

Embedding Perturbation may Better Reflect Intermediate-Step Uncertainty in LLM Reasoning

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 AI
Jul 23

Statistical Early Stopping for Reasoning Models

arXiv:2602. 13935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given ill-posed or ambiguous queries.

By Yangxinyu Xie, Tao Wang, Soham Mallick, Yan Sun, Georgy Noarov, Mengxin Yu, Tanwi Mallick, Weijie J. Su, Edgar Dobriban
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.

By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

Reasoning Quality Emerges Early: Data Curation for Reasoning Models

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a small, high-quality set of long reasoning traces is an effective approach for eliciting strong reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods for curating high-quality SFT data rely heavily on strong reasoning models to filter examples based on diversity and difficulty, making the curation process costly while often yielding suboptimal data quality.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

GUT: Quantifying and Optimizing the Reasoning Uncertainty of LLMs via Graph Complexity

The paper introduces GUT, a method that uses directed acyclic graphs to represent all possible reasoning branches of Large Language Models (LLMs). It comprises two modules: GUT-Q, which quantifies reasoning uncertainty by approximating graph complexity, and GUT-O, which reduces uncertainty through reinforcement learning that rewards lower uncertainty. Experiments on four LLMs across five datasets demonstrate GUT’s effectiveness in measuring and mitigating reasoning uncertainty.

By Shuang Liang, Xin-Yu Hu, Xiang-Jun Ou, Shao-Qun Zhang