Large language models (LLMs) often answer ambiguous inputs as if they had a single intended meaning. This is problematic because input ambiguity is an upstream source of uncertainty: when a prompt adm...
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.
By Omer Nahum, Niv Nayman, Jonathan Fhima, Alon Zolfi, Jeremy Levy, Shai Mazor, Paolo Favaro
VIDA (Visually-Dependent Ambiguity) is a new dataset comprising 2,500 curated instances designed to test whether multimodal machine translation models can use visual input to resolve ambiguous source spans. The authors also introduce Disambiguation-Centric Metrics, which employ an LLM-as-a-judge classifier to verify correct span-level resolution. Experiments with recent large vision‑language models show that visual disambiguation remains difficult, and that chain‑of‑thought supervised fine‑tuning yields stronger out‑of‑distribution performance, especially for collective‑noun ambiguities.
By Jingheng Pan, Xintong Wang, Longyue Wang, Liang Ding, Weihua Luo, Chris Biemann
arXiv:2609.37594v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Uncertainty estimates tell us how unsure a model is, but not why. Without knowing which parts of an input influences a model's uncertainty, we cannot t...
By David Achara, Maryam Sultana, Alexander D. Rast, Fabio Cuzzolin
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...
By Jingqin Tang, Tim Tomov, Sebastian Schmidt, Dominik Fuchsgruber, Stephan G\"unnemann
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.