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:2610.20052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ambiguous inputs can admit multiple interpretations, each potentially yielding a different answer. Existing work largely treats this ambiguity as a pro...
arXiv:2606. 02093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The task of Error Prediction, namely predicting whether a model output is correct, is commonly tackled with Uncertainty Quantification (UQ).
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.
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: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...
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.
Large language models are informing decisions with ever-higher stakes. As the consequences of their errors grow, a central question becomes harder to ignore: how much can we trust an individual answer...
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...
arXiv:2606. 03135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents often operate under underspecified user instructions, where latent uncertainty over user intent leads to erroneous tool actions.
arXiv:2610.09087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are informing decisions with ever-higher stakes. As the consequences of their errors grow, a central question becomes harder to...
arXiv:2608. 09080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in medical question answering and clinical reasoning tasks.
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.