Embedding Perturbation may Better Reflect Intermediate-Step Uncertainty in LLM Reasoning
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2606. 03969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable uncertainty communication is critical to the trustworthiness of LLMs, yet faithful calibration (FC)--the alignment between models' intrinsic and (linguistically) expressed confidence--is a persistent failure mode.
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.
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:2602. 13935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given ill-posed or ambiguous queries.
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. 09856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning typically focuses on deductive tasks such as mathematics and coding where correctness is verifiable.