arXiv:2606. 11211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment.
By Prakul Sunil Hiremath, Harshit R. Hiremath
The paper introduces F-ICL, a benchmark that measures in‑context algorithmic reasoning in language models by exhaustively enumerating 86 million valid programs of length ≤13 on a Turing‑complete machine and computing the exact posterior under a bounded Levin–Solomonoff prior. Unlike typical benchmarks, F‑ICL provides a distributional reference rather than just answers, allowing the evaluation of models’ inductive priors. Across 105 configurations of models ranging from 0.8 B to 675 B parameters, models achieve up to 92 % accuracy, yet many still deviate from the Bayes‑optimal reference, and the study derives theoretical bounds on cumulative loss for predictors with positive prior weight on the reference.
By Luan Ozelim, Hector Zenil
arXiv:2609. 29140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repeated evaluation can estimate a benchmark score accurately while still requiring replication to certify narrow uncertainty.
By Yezhou Cheng, Runjia Du, Zeming Liu, Qibai Chen, Hang Lyu, Yilan Wei, Yankai Zeng, Bojun Lin
arXiv:2606. 00376v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extended chain-of-thought reasoning can degrade performance on deterministic state-tracking tasks, not due to preference biases, but limits rooted in the information-theoretic capacity of decoder-only attention.
By Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu
The paper introduces a Bayesian self‑escalation strategy for hierarchical large‑language‑model agents, allowing an agent to detect during its own reasoning that it is unlikely to succeed and hand control over to a stronger model. The authors formalise this as an optimal‑stopping problem over a learned competence posterior, derive a myopic escalation threshold, and prove that the optimal policy is a time‑varying threshold without assumptions on the raw signal. They provide theoretical guarantees—including a 1/√n regret decay with n calibration trajectories—and validate the approach in simulations and a real‑model code‑generation cascade, showing that the escalation frontier outperforms post‑hoc routing at equal cost.
whyItMatters":"The study offers a principled, theoretically grounded method for agents to dynamically decide when to seek stronger models, potentially improving efficiency and reliability in hierarchical LLM systems."
By Nadeem Shaikh
Repeated evaluation can estimate a benchmark score accurately while still requiring replication to certify narrow uncertainty. We characterize that requirement on a fixed grid of $M$ tasks with $L$ binary paths per task under the hard budget $(M+t)K$, where each path costs at most $K$ responses or episodes.