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Related papers: Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions

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With the broader use of language models (LMs) comes the need to estimate their ability to respond reliably to prompts (e.g., are generated responses likely to be correct?). Uncertainty quantification tools (notions of confidence and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Evgenia Ilia , Wilker Aziz

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong average performance yet remain unreliable at the instance level, with frequent hallucinations, brittle failures, and poorly calibrated confidence. We study reliability through the lens of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pranav Kallem

The ubiquity of machine learning based predictive models in modern society naturally leads people to ask how trustworthy those models are? In predictive modeling, it is quite common to induce a trade-off between accuracy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 John Mitros , Brian Mac Namee

In safety-critical applications, language models should be able to characterize their uncertainty with meaningful probabilities. Many uncertainty quantification approaches require supervised data; however, finding suitable unseen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sophia Hager , Simon Zeng , Nicholas Andrews

In this paper, we show that counterfactual explanations of confidence scores help users better understand and better trust an AI model's prediction in human-subject studies. Showing confidence scores in human-agent interaction systems can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Thao Le , Tim Miller , Ronal Singh , Liz Sonenberg

We study the feasibility of identifying epistemic uncertainty (reflecting a lack of knowledge), as opposed to aleatoric uncertainty (reflecting entropy in the underlying distribution), in the outputs of large language models (LLMs) over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Gustaf Ahdritz , Tian Qin , Nikhil Vyas , Boaz Barak , Benjamin L. Edelman

Ambiguity is inherent to open-domain question answering; especially when exploring new topics, it can be difficult to ask questions that have a single, unambiguous answer. In this paper, we introduce AmbigQA, a new open-domain question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Sewon Min , Julian Michael , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

It is important for Large Language Models (LLMs) to be aware of the boundary of their knowledge, distinguishing queries they can confidently answer from those that lie beyond their capabilities. Such awareness enables models to perform…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Lihu Chen , Gerard de Melo , Fabian M. Suchanek , Gaël Varoquaux

Models can fail in unpredictable ways during deployment due to task ambiguity, when multiple behaviors are consistent with the provided training data. An example is an object classifier trained on red squares and blue circles: when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Alex Tamkin , Dat Nguyen , Salil Deshpande , Jesse Mu , Noah Goodman

Temporary syntactic ambiguities arise when the beginning of a sentence is compatible with multiple syntactic analyses. We inspect to which extent neural language models (LMs) exhibit uncertainty over such analyses when processing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Laura Aina , Tal Linzen

Despite the significant progress made in practical applications of aligned language models (LMs), they tend to be overconfident in output answers compared to the corresponding pre-trained LMs. In this work, we systematically evaluate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Guande He , Peng Cui , Jianfei Chen , Wenbo Hu , Jun Zhu

Individuals use models to guide decisions, but many models are wrong. This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when individuals also entertain alternative models. Consider an agent who uses her model to learn the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-22 Cuimin Ba

The real-world information sources are inherently multilingual, which naturally raises a question about whether language models can synthesize information across languages. In this paper, we introduce a simple two-hop question answering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yan Meng , Wafaa Mohammed , Christof Monz

Large language models have shown unprecedented abilities in generating linguistically coherent and syntactically correct natural language output. However, they often return incorrect and inconsistent answers to input questions. Due to the…

Databases · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Jasmin Mousavi , Arash Termehchy

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

Trust is a crucial factor affecting the adoption of machine learning (ML) models. Qualitative studies have revealed that end-users, particularly in the medical domain, need models that can express their uncertainty in decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Andrew Houston , Georgina Cosma

Same-model self-verification, prompting a model to audit its own predicted answer, is a plausible confidence signal for selective prediction, but its practical value remains unclear once strong likelihood-based baselines are taken…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Aditya Ajay Phalod

Weakly supervised question answering usually has only the final answers as supervision signals while the correct solutions to derive the answers are not provided. This setting gives rise to the spurious solution problem: there may exist…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Zhihong Shao , Lifeng Shang , Qun Liu , Minlie Huang

Explainable AI methods facilitate the understanding of model behaviour, yet, small, imperceptible perturbations to inputs can vastly distort explanations. As these explanations are typically evaluated holistically, before model deployment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Sara Vera Marjanović , Isabelle Augenstein , Christina Lioma

Large language models (LLMs) can produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge. Through a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Sunnie S. Y. Kim , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan , Q. Vera Liao , Tania Lombrozo , Olga Russakovsky