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Related papers: Epistemic Observability in Language Models

200 papers

Text-to-SQL enables users to interact with databases through natural language, simplifying the retrieval and synthesis of information. Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in converting natural language questions into SQL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Oleg Somov , Elena Tutubalina

When asked to explain their decisions, LLMs can often give explanations which sound plausible to humans. But are these explanations faithful, i.e. do they convey the factors actually responsible for the decision? In this work, we analyse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Noah Y. Siegel , Nicolas Heess , Maria Perez-Ortiz , Oana-Maria Camburu

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in production environments has created an urgent need for observability systems that span the full stack -- from model internals to GPU kernels. Yet existing monitoring approaches address…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Twinkll Sisodia

Learning under unobservable feedback reliability poses a distinct challenge beyond optimization robustness: a system must decide whether to learn from an experience, not only how to learn stably. We study this setting as Epistemic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Zhipeng Zhang , Zhenjie Yao , Kai Li , Lei Yang

The evaluation and post-training of large language models (LLMs) rely on supervision, but strong supervision for difficult tasks is often unavailable, especially when evaluating frontier models. In such cases, models are demonstrated to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Tianyi Alex Qiu , Micah Carroll , Cameron Allen

Selective prediction systems can mitigate harms resulting from language model hallucinations by abstaining from answering in high-risk cases. Uncertainty quantification techniques are often employed to identify such cases, but are rarely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Edward Phillips , Fredrik K. Gustafsson , Sean Wu , Anshul Thakur , David A. Clifton

Large language models (LLMs) produce fluent but unsupported answers - hallucinations - limiting safe deployment in high-stakes domains. We propose ECLIPSE, a framework that treats hallucination as a mismatch between a model's semantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Mainak Singha

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in critical decision-making systems, the lack of reliable methods to measure their uncertainty presents a fundamental trustworthiness risk. We introduce a normalized confidence score…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Xie Xiaohu , Liu Xiaohu , Yao Benjamin

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, accurately assessing their confidence is crucial. Humans typically express confidence through epistemic markers (e.g., "fairly confident") instead of numerical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jiayu Liu , Qing Zong , Weiqi Wang , Yangqiu Song

In many high-risk machine learning applications it is essential for a model to indicate when it is uncertain about a prediction. While large language models (LLMs) can reach and even surpass human-level accuracy on a variety of benchmarks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Evan Becker , Stefano Soatto

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for automated grading, but their outputs can be unreliable. Rather than improving grading accuracy directly, we address a complementary problem: \textit{predicting when an LLM grader is likely to be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Robinson Ferrer , Damla Turgut , Zhongzhou Chen , Shashank Sonkar

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

Current evaluation of mathematical reasoning in language models relies primarily on answer accuracy, potentially masking fundamental failures in logical computation. We introduce a diagnostic framework that distinguishes genuine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Subramanyam Sahoo , Vinija Jain , Saanidhya Vats , Siddharth Mohapatra , Rui Min , Aman Chadha , Divya Chaudhary

White-box monitors are a popular technique for detecting potentially harmful behaviours in language models. While they perform well in general, their effectiveness in detecting text-ambiguous behaviour is disputed. In this work, we find…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Gerard Boxo , Aman Neelappa , Shivam Raval

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy. Extended reasoning via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Robert Welch , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith

Reinforcement-learned reasoning has powered recent AI leaps on verifiable tasks, including mathematics, code, and structure prediction. The harder bottleneck is evaluative judgment in low-verifiability domains, where no oracle anchors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Ziqin Gong , Ning Li , Huaikang Zhou

Small language models (SLMs) have been increasingly deployed in edge devices and other resource-constrained settings. However, these models make confident mispredictions and produce unstable output, making them risky for factual and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Adeyemi Adeseye , Aisvarya Adeseye , Hannu Tenhunen , Jouni Isoaho

Language prediction is constrained by informational entropy intrinsic to language, such that there exists a limit to how accurate any language model can become and equivalently a lower bound to language compression. The most efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Benjamin L. Badger , Matthew Neligeorge

In contested domains, instruction-tuned language models must balance user-alignment pressures against faithfulness to the in-context evidence. To evaluate this tension, we introduce a controlled epistemic-conflict framework grounded in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Sai Koneru , Elphin Joe , Christine Kirchhoff , Jian Wu , Sarah Rajtmajer

Single-prompt accuracy is the dominant way to benchmark language models, but it can miss reliability failures that matter. We evaluate a 15-model open-weight corpus, with the main reliability analyses focused on 10 instruct models across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ranit Karmakar , Jayita Chatterjee