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
arXiv:2606. 19353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations.
By Jinseok Chung, Minkyoung Song, Hyunji Jung, Namhoon Lee
arXiv:2608. 05995v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable uncertainty estimates are critical in safety-sensitive applications, where understanding the sources of predictive uncertainty is essential.
By Frieder Wizgall, Georg Tirpitz, Moritz Seiler, Kerstin Ritter, B\'alint Mucs\'anyi
arXiv:2606. 29657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified.
By Yoshua Bengio, Oliver Richardson, Tom\'a\v{s} Gaven\v{c}iak, Michael Cohen, Rory Svarc, Damiano Fornasiere, Gael Gendron, David Hyland, Aton Kamanda, Adam Oberman, Francis Rhys Ward, Anna Gaven\v{c}iak, Jacob Livingston Slosser, Vincent Mai, Iulian Serban, Joumana Ghosn
arXiv:2603. 24967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding why a large language model (LLM) is uncertain about the response is important for their reliable deployment.
By Aditya Taparia, Ransalu Senanayake, Kowshik Thopalli, Vivek Narayanaswamy
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.