The paper introduces Causal-Invariant Masking (CIM) to better quantify epistemic uncertainty in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by measuring semantic shift between original predictions and those conditioned on a causally-focused view. It proposes Semantic Divergence as a core metric that converges to the variance of the model’s sensitivity to non‑causal correlations, and introduces Expected Embedding Drift (EED) as a fast geometric proxy that estimates this shift directly in the embedding space. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art uncertainty quantification performance and a nearly 50% speedup with EED.
arXiv:2507. 06722v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding how large language models (LLMs) internally represent and process their predictions is central to detecting uncertainty and preventing hallucinations.
arXiv:2606. 32012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncertainty estimation has been a long-standing challenge in AI models; it amounts to "knowing what you don't know," and metacognition is notoriously difficult even for humans (cf.
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...
arXiv:2512.14177v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often produce plausible but unreliable outputs, making robust uncertainty estimation essential. Recent work on...
arXiv:2603. 24967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding why a large language model (LLM) is uncertain about the response is important for their reliable deployment.
arXiv:2606. 09859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: MLLMs frequently hallucinate objects inconsistent with visual inputs.
arXiv:2608.29996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance across many multimodal tasks; however, they often exploit spurious object-background...
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.
arXiv:2602.06652v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The robustness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) is commonly assessed through output-level invariance, implicitly assuming that stable predictions r...
arXiv:2605. 13352v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard dual-encoder vision-language models that map images and text to deterministic points on a shared unit hypersphere through $\ell_2$ normalization typically expose neither \emph{aleatoric} uncertainty (cross-modal ambiguity) nor \emph{epistemic} uncertainty (lack of training-distribution support).
arXiv:2606. 14758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Vision-Language Models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, the trustworthiness of their explanations becomes crucial.
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.