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The output of Large Language Models (LLMs) are a function of the internal model's parameters and the input provided into the context window. The hypothesis presented here is that under a greedy sampling strategy the variance in the LLM's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Srijith Rajamohan , Ahmed Salhin , Josh Frazier , Rohit Kumar , Yu-Cheng Tsai , Todd Cook

Large language models (LLMs) produce outputs with varying levels of uncertainty, and, just as often, varying levels of correctness; making their practical reliability far from guaranteed. To quantify this uncertainty, we systematically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Christian Hobelsberger , Theresa Winner , Andreas Nawroth , Oliver Mitevski , Anna-Carolina Haensch

To mitigate the high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs), Speculative Decoding has emerged as a novel decoding paradigm for LLM inference. In each decoding step, this method first drafts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Heming Xia , Zhe Yang , Qingxiu Dong , Peiyi Wang , Yongqi Li , Tao Ge , Tianyu Liu , Wenjie Li , Zhifang Sui

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multi-turn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tianyi Zhou , Johanne Medina , Sanjay Chawla

Confidence estimation is crucial for reflecting the reliability of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the widely used closed-source models. Utilizing data augmentation for confidence estimation is viable, but discussions focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Rui Wang , Renyu Zhu , Minmin Lin , Runze Wu , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan , Haobo Wang

As large language models continue to be widely developed, robust uncertainty quantification techniques will become crucial for their safe deployment in high-stakes scenarios. In this work, we explore how conformal prediction can be used to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Bhawesh Kumar , Charlie Lu , Gauri Gupta , Anil Palepu , David Bellamy , Ramesh Raskar , Andrew Beam

When using large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes applications, we need to know when we can trust their predictions. Some works argue that prompting high-performance LLMs is sufficient to produce calibrated uncertainties, while others…

The practice of speculative decoding, whereby inference is probabilistically supported by a smaller, cheaper, ``drafter'' model, has become a standard technique for systematically reducing the decoding time of large language models. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jameson Sandler , Ahmet Üstün , Marco Romanelli , Sara Hooker , Ferdinando Fioretto

While Contrastive Decoding (CD) has proven effective at enhancing Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), the underlying mechanisms driving its success and the comparative efficacy of different strategies remain unclear. This study…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Tzu-Quan Lin , Wei-Ping Huang , Yi-Cheng Lin , Hung-yi Lee

The development of highly fluent large language models (LLMs) has prompted increased interest in assessing their reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. We investigate whether several LLMs can solve a classic type of deductive reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Spencer M. Seals , Valerie L. Shalin

While conditional language models have greatly improved in their ability to output high-quality natural language, many NLP applications benefit from being able to generate a diverse set of candidate sequences. Diverse decoding strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Daphne Ippolito , Reno Kriz , Maria Kustikova , João Sedoc , Chris Callison-Burch

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Linwei Tao , Yi-Fan Yeh , Bo Kai , Minjing Dong , Tao Huang , Tom A. Lamb , Jialin Yu , Philip H. S. Torr , Chang Xu

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to various domains, concerns regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs in safety-critical scenarios have been raised, due to their unpredictable tendency to hallucinate and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Xin Qiu , Risto Miikkulainen

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored across a range of reasoning tasks. However, LLMs sometimes struggle with reasoning tasks under uncertainty that are relatively easy for humans, such as planning actions in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Ziwei Deng , Mian Deng , Chenjing Liang , Zeming Gao , Chennan Ma , Chenxing Lin , Haipeng Zhang , Songzhu Mei , Siqi Shen , Cheng Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as alternatives to human experts for estimating unknown quantities with associated uncertainty, a process known as Bayesian elicitation. We test this by asking eleven LLMs to estimate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Luka Hobor , Mario Brcic , Mihael Kovac , Kristijan Poje

We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Gal Yona , Roee Aharoni , Mor Geva

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed and democratized on edge devices. To improve the efficiency of on-device deployment, small language models (SLMs) are often adopted due to their efficient decoding latency and reduced…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Yu-Neng Chuang , Leisheng Yu , Guanchu Wang , Lizhe Zhang , Zirui Liu , Xuanting Cai , Yang Sui , Vladimir Braverman , Xia Hu

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

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Haoran Yang , Yumeng Zhang , Jiaqi Xu , Hongyuan Lu , Pheng Ann Heng , Wai Lam

Large language models~(LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance in language tasks, yet their auto-regressive inference is limited due to high computational requirements and is sub-optimal due to the exposure bias. Inspired by speculative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Hongyi Yuan , Keming Lu , Fei Huang , Zheng Yuan , Chang Zhou