The paper introduces Functional Entropy, a new uncertainty quantification technique for assessing the functional correctness of code generated by large language models. It evaluates token‑probability and sampling‑based methods across three programming languages and five LLMs, finding that token‑probability approaches generalize well while NLI‑based sampling fails due to semantic clustering. Functional equivalence methods, which replace NLI with an LLM‑based functional assessment, achieve superior AUROC and calibration in most model‑benchmark combinations.
arXiv:2606. 09577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as code generators, where silently wrong programs pose real safety and reliability risks.
arXiv:2608. 14659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models for code generation often produce incorrect solutions without reliable indicators of failure.
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.
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...
The paper presents a geometric framework for quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) at both the prompt and answer levels. By modeling a prompt-conditioned semantic distribution in answer embedding space and using archetypal analysis on multiple sampled answers, the method estimates distribution entropy for prompt-level uncertainty and atypicality for individual answer reliability. Experiments demonstrate comparable or superior performance to existing techniques on short-form QA datasets and notably better results on medical datasets where hallucinations pose critical risks.
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.
The paper investigates hallucination detection in black‑box large language models by leveraging two accessible signals: semantic entropy, which captures disagreement among sampled response meanings, and token‑level uncertainty derived from log‑probabilities. It introduces a TopK aggregation technique, a hybrid CoCoA method combining uncertainty with semantic dissimilarity, and two supervised approaches—Gated and Stacked—that integrate token and semantic features. Across seven benchmarks and four language models, the supervised Stacked method performs best in many cases, while TopK and CoCoA remain competitive without labeled data, though all methods require careful threshold calibration.
arXiv:2603. 24929v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding and quantifying uncertainty in large language model (LLM) outputs is critical for reliable deployment.
arXiv:2607. 10476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for retrieving knowledge through seamless, human-like interactions.
arXiv:2606. 07528v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination in large language models (LLMs), defined as the generation of factually incorrect or unsupported content, remains a critical barrier to reliable deployment.
arXiv:2607. 12273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Code Large Language Models (LLMs) become central to modern software engineering, their inherent stochasticity poses significant real-world risks, where even minor errors can lead to severe functional, security, or safety consequences.
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.