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Factual knowledge encoded in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) enriches their representations and justifies their use as knowledge bases. Previous work has focused on probing PLMs for factual knowledge by measuring how often they can…
Calibration is a popular framework to evaluate whether a classifier knows when it does not know - i.e., its predictive probabilities are a good indication of how likely a prediction is to be correct. Correctness is commonly estimated…
Supporting model interpretability for complex phenomena where annotators can legitimately disagree, such as emotion recognition, is a challenging machine learning task. In this work, we show that explicitly quantifying the uncertainty in…
Counterfactual explanations are widely used to interpret machine learning predictions by identifying minimal changes to input features that would alter a model's decision. However, most existing counterfactual methods have not been tested…
A fundamental question in causal inference is whether it is possible to reliably infer manipulation effects from observational data. There are a variety of senses of asymptotic reliability in the statistical literature, among which the most…
Neuroscientists frequently use a certain statistical reasoning to establish the existence of distinct neuronal processes in the brain. We show that this reasoning is flawed and that the large corresponding literature needs reconsideration.…
In statistical practice, whether a Bayesian or frequentist approach is used in inference depends not only on the availability of prior information but also on the attitude taken toward partial prior information, with frequentists tending to…
Is it possible for a large sequence of measurements or observations, which support a hypothesis, to counterintuitively decrease our confidence? Can unanimous support be too good to be true? The assumption of independence is often made in…
The use of historical estimates in current studies is common in a wide variety of application areas. Nevertheless, despite their routine use the uncertainty associated with historical estimates is rarely properly accounted for in the…
Automated fact-checking is often presented as an epistemic tool that fact-checkers, social media consumers, and other stakeholders can use to fight misinformation. Nevertheless, few papers thoroughly discuss how. We document this by…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…
Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through…
Statistical science (as opposed to mathematical statistics) involves far more than probability theory, for it requires realistic causal models of data generators - even for purely descriptive goals. Statistical decision theory requires more…
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) research has primarily focused on closed-book factual question answering (QA), while contextual QA remains unexplored, despite its importance in real-world applications. In this work, we focus on UQ for the…
We give a probabilistic analysis of inductive knowledge and belief and explore its predictions concerning knowledge about the future, about laws of nature, and about the values of inexactly measured quantities. The analysis combines a…
The controversy about statistical significance vs. scientific relevance is more than 100 years old. But still nowadays null hypothesis significance testing is considered as gold standard in many empirical fields from economics and social…
Advances in the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have led to their use for information retrieval, and as components in automated decision systems. A faithful representation of probabilistic reasoning in these models may…
Uncertainty quantification has received increasing attention in machine learning in the recent past. In particular, a distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty has been found useful in this regard. The latter refers to the…
We report an inconsistency found in probability theory (also referred to as measure-theoretic probability). For probability measures induced by real-valued random variables, we deduce an "equality" such that one side of the "equality" is a…
Much of uncertainty quantification to date has focused on determining the effect of variables modeled probabilistically, and with a known distribution, on some physical or engineering system. We develop methods to obtain information on the…