arXiv:2606. 29054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deployed for structured generation (NER, JSON extraction, QA, and classification) lack formal reliability guarantees, and standard heuristic abstention policies miss user-specified risk targets by 7.
By Varun Kotte
arXiv:2608. 05064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small open-weight language models increasingly run in private, offline, and cost-sensitive settings, where the key deployment question is not only what a model answers but when it should defer to a human.
By Jianru Shen
arXiv:2608. 01460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal prediction (CP) is a distribution-free framework for uncertainty quantification that has recently been adapted to large language models (LLMs), providing prediction sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees under exchangeability.
By Yuqicheng Zhu, Jialin Yu, Lin Li, Gengyuan Zhang, Zhen Yang, Steffen Staab, Puneet Dokania, Philip Torr, Jie Tang, Evgeny Kharlamov
SimplexUQ introduces the first benchmark and reproducible protocol for evaluating how conformal prediction wrappers allocate coverage across simplex‑valued predictions. The framework, called SimplexTasks‑12, combines six synthetic regimes and six real tasks (e.g., class probabilities, topic mixtures, spectral abundances) to compare existing wrappers on metrics such as marginal coverage, worst‑stratum coverage, max disparity, and computational cost. Empirical results show that no single wrapper consistently dominates, with Mondrian and BatchMVP performing best in different settings, and that removing predictor bias only partially mitigates disparity.
By Liang You, Hengyu Shi, Dongwen Ou
The paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating whether off‑the‑shelf small language models (SLMs) can reliably perform microtasks that support a large language model (LLM) planner, such as auto‑approving shell commands, writing memory, selecting tools, and ranking past turns. Using fixed prompts and confidence‑interval‑aware eligibility thresholds, the authors test several Qwen3 models (0.6/1.7/4/8 B) in FP16 with no tuning and find that none of the 16 configurations meet the eligibility criteria. Quantization to 4‑bit precision further degrades performance, with the eligibility gap tracking model size rather than precision, and the issue persists across different models (e.g., Llama‑3.x) and prompt variations.
By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv:2608. 05162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pooling is a consequential but under-examined design choice in decoder-only concept representation work: practitioners must collapse token-level hidden states into a passage-level vector, yet no shared protocol exists for comparing this choice across concepts, models, and tasks.
By Ayushi Agarwal