arXiv AI By Shuting Xie, Nathaniel Lesperance, Graham W. Taylor

Hierarchy-Aware Supervised Uncertainty Estimation for Black-box LLM Taxonomic Reasoning

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The paper introduces a method for estimating uncertainty in hierarchical taxonomic reasoning produced by black‑box large language models (LLMs). By extracting proxy features with an open‑source tool and training lightweight supervised estimators that incorporate hierarchy‑aware supervision, the authors predict rank‑wise correctness. Across three LLMs, these estimators outperform token‑likelihood baselines, raising micro AUROC from 0.57 to 0.75–0.80, with a rank‑specific multi‑head design delivering the best results.

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