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:2603. 29466v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing methods for quantifying predictive uncertainty in neural networks are either computationally intractable for large language models or require access to training data that is typically unavailable.
By Nils Gr\"unefeld, Jes Frellsen, Christian Hardmeier
arXiv:2604.08974v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification techniques measure confidence in language model outputs to support critical applications like hallucination detection an...
By Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Cesare Spinoso di-Piano, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
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.
By Feiyang Li, Shengjing Liu, Qi Zhan, Sijie Cheng, Weiqing Wang, Hongwen Chen, Yuxuan Yang, Wen Wang, Yile Wang, Hui Huang
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:2605.25831v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling...
By Joris Baan, Wilker Aziz, Barbara Plank, Raquel Fern\'andez