English

ANCHOR: Abductive Network Construction with Hierarchical Orchestration for Reliable Probability Inference in Large Language Models

Computation and Language 2026-05-13 v2

Abstract

A central challenge in large-scale decision-making under incomplete information is estimating reliable probabilities. Recent approaches use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate explanatory factors and coarse-grained probability estimates, which are then refined by a Na\"ive Bayes model over factor combinations. However, sparse factor spaces often yield ``unknown'' predictions, while expanding factors increases noise and spurious correlations, weakening conditional independence and degrading reliability. To address these limitations, we propose \textsc{Anchor}, an aggregated Bayesian inference framework over a hierarchical factor space. It constructs dense factor hierarchies through iterative generation and clustering, maps contexts via hierarchical retrieval and refinement, and augments Na\"ive Bayes with a Causal Bayesian Network to model latent factor dependencies. Experiments show that \textsc{Anchor} markedly reduces ``unknown'' predictions and produces more reliable probability estimates than direct LLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing time and token overhead.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.10328,
  title  = {ANCHOR: Abductive Network Construction with Hierarchical Orchestration for Reliable Probability Inference in Large Language Models},
  author = {Wentao Qiu and Guanran Luo and Zhongquan Jian and Jingqi Gao and Meihong Wang and Qingqiang Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.10328},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted by ICML 2026