arXiv AI

Knowing Your Uncertainty -- On the application of LLM in social sciences

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 7

The Anatomy of Uncertainty in LLMs

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.

By Aditya Taparia, Ransalu Senanayake, Kowshik Thopalli, Vivek Narayanaswamy
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Rethinking Uncertainty Evaluation in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration is the primary criterion for evaluating LLM confidence, but it is insufficient: it admits trivially incoherent estimators, depends on the evaluation distribution, and does not test the extent to which the estimation can be interpreted as a consistent, underlying probability function.

By Krish Matta, Atharv Naphade, Andy Zou
arXiv AI
3d ago

Demographic Pluralism: Inference-Time Modeling of Pluralistic Human Preference Distributions

The paper introduces Demographic Pluralism, an inference-time framework that estimates population-level opinion distributions without requiring training data or task-specific fine-tuning. It generates multiple perspectives within demographically grounded groups and, across four model backbones on GlobalOpinionQA and VITAL, reduces Jensen-Shannon distance by 8.4%–26.4% compared to Modular Pluralism. The study finds that equal weighting of group perspectives yields the best overall performance, while weighted aggregation performs worse due to increased group-level error.

By Meng-Chen Wu, Qipin Chen, Ansh Jain, Tess Wood, Zhe Du, Si-Chi Chin
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Response drift across frontier large language models

arXiv:2607. 20454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: All frontier large language models (LLMs) exhibit response drift -- producing outputs that deviate from expert-validated references -- yet the magnitude and structure of this drift remain uncharacterised by systematic human evaluation.

By Mohammed Aledhari, Ali Aledhari, Fatimah Aledhari, Gowtham Venkat Eathamokkala, Mohamed Rahouti
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Label-Confidence-Aware Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation

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.

By Qinhong Lin, Yinglun Feng, Yuhao Zhang, Zhongliang Yang, Linna Zhou
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Do LLMs Know a Good Hypothesis When They See One? Logit-Based Energy Scoring Outperforms Prompted LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Hypothesis Ranking

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably assess scientific hypotheses by using a logit-based energy scoring method that leverages the model’s intrinsic confidence. Across 1,323 papers in 12 disciplines, this intrinsic scoring achieved a 33.0% Hit@1 rate, outperforming a prompted listwise ranking approach that scored 16.6%. The best result, a 1‑billion‑parameter model with logit-based energy scoring, reached 53.1% Hit@1, suggesting that confidence‑based evaluation could improve trustworthy AI‑enabled scientific discovery.

By Swati Rajwal, Sanjay Das, Tirthankar Ghosal