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Large language models (LLMs) often make accurate next token predictions but their confidence in these predictions can be poorly calibrated: high-confidence predictions are frequently wrong, and low-confidence predictions may be correct.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Nisarg Parikh , Ananya Sai , Pannaga Shivaswamy , Kunjal Panchal , Andrew Lan

Language model (LM) "reasoning", commonly described as Chain-of-Thought or test-time scaling, often improves benchmark performance, but the dynamics underlying this process remain poorly understood. We study these dynamics through the lens…

Estimating uncertainty in Large Language Models (LLMs) is important for properly evaluating LLMs, and ensuring safety for users. However, prior approaches to uncertainty estimation focus on the final answer in generated text, ignoring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Eric Bigelow , Ari Holtzman , Hidenori Tanaka , Tomer Ullman

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as these models become increasingly integrated into various societal and decision-making processes. Traditional methods, such as reinforcement learning from human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Prashant Trivedi , Souradip Chakraborty , Avinash Reddy , Vaneet Aggarwal , Amrit Singh Bedi , George K. Atia

Although large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly capable of solving challenging real-world tasks, accurately quantifying their uncertainty remains a critical open problem--one that limits their applicability in high-stakes…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but remain vulnerable to hallucinations, generating factually incorrect or misleading outputs. Uncertainty estimation, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Manh Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Hung Le

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is essential for safe and useful LLMs. Previous works mainly adopt reinforcement learning (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) with human feedback for alignment.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Tianci Xue , Ziqi Wang , Heng Ji

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Yikun Wang , Rui Zheng , Liang Ding , Qi Zhang , Dahua Lin , Dacheng Tao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes applications, making robust safety guarantees a central practical and commercial concern. Existing safety evaluations predominantly rely on fixed collections of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Zafir Shamsi , Nikhil Chekuru , Zachary Guzman , Shivank Garg

The key to building trustworthy large language models (LLMs) lies in endowing them with inherent uncertainty expression capabilities, thereby mitigating overconfident errors in high-stakes applications. However, existing RL paradigms such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xianzhou Zeng , Jing Huang , Chunmei Xie , Gongrui Nan , Siye Chen , Mengyu Lu , Weiqi Xiong , Qixuan Zhou , Junhao Zhang , Qiang Zhu , Yadong Li , Xingzhong Xu

Uncertainty estimation is important for deploying LLMs in high-stakes applications such as healthcare and finance, where hallucinations can appear fluent and plausible while being factually incorrect, making it difficult for users to judge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingcheng Zhu , Yu Liu , Tingting Zhu

The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) is reshaping the landscape of automatic assessment in education. While these systems demonstrate substantial advantages in adaptability to diverse question types and flexibility in output…

Rankings derived from pairwise comparisons are central to many economic and computational systems. In the context of large language models (LLMs), rankings are typically constructed from human preference data and presented as leaderboards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Angel Rodrigo Avelar Menendez , Yufeng Liu , Xiaowu Dai

Large language models (LLMs) are notorious for hallucinating, i.e., producing erroneous claims in their output. Such hallucinations can be dangerous, as occasional factual inaccuracies in the generated text might be obscured by the rest of…

Accurate confidence estimation is essential for trustworthy large language models (LLMs) systems, as it empowers the user to determine when to trust outputs and enables reliable deployment in safety-critical applications. Current confidence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Mingruo Yuan , Shuyi Zhang , Ben Kao

Large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a key method to adapt pre-trained models to domain-specific tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, standard SFT uniformly penalizes all tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhiwen Ruan , Yixia Li , He Zhu , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Yudi Pawitan , Chris Holmes

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity in recent years for their utility in various applications. However, they are sensitive to non-semantic changes in prompt formats, where small changes in the prompt format can lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Lilian Ngweta , Kiran Kate , Jason Tsay , Yara Rizk

The recent explosion in the capabilities of large language models has led to a wave of interest in how best to prompt a model to perform a given task. While it may be tempting to simply choose a prompt based on average performance on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Thomas P. Zollo , Todd Morrill , Zhun Deng , Jake C. Snell , Toniann Pitassi , Richard Zemel

Machine unlearning aims to forget sensitive knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) while maintaining general utility. However, existing approaches typically treat all tokens in a response indiscriminately and enforce uncertainty over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Naixin Zhai , Pengyang Shao , Binbin Zheng , Yonghui Yang , Fei Shen , Long Bai , Xun Yang