arXiv Machine Learning

The Illusion of Stochasticity in LLMs

arXiv:2604. 06543v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we demonstrate that reliable stochastic sampling is a fundamental yet unfulfilled requirement for Large Language Models (LLMs) operating as agents.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Language models suffer from a curse of ambiguity

arXiv:2608. 15448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on sampling as a driver of their own improvement, making the fidelity of their learned distributions more critical than ever.

By Nicolas Zucchet, Hyun Dong Lee, Scott Linderman
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

On the Effect of Sampling Diversity in Scaling LLM Inference

arXiv:2502. 11027v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) scaling inference is key to unlocking greater performance, and leveraging diversity has proven an effective way to enhance it.

By Tianchun Wang, Zichuan Liu, Yuanzhou Chen, Jonathan Light, Weiyang Liu, Haifeng Chen, Xiang Zhang, Wei Cheng
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
Aug 5

Emulate or Estimate? The Divergent Strengths of Base and Post-Trained Language Models for Opinion Simulation

arXiv:2608. 03044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to simulate human opinions, but prior work reports conflicting results: some studies find promising alignment with human survey data, while others find persona collapse and weak demographic sensitivity.

By Seth Grief-Albert, Jessica Bo, Difan Jiao, Ashton Anderson