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To use generative question-and-answering (QA) systems for decision-making and in any critical application, these systems need to provide well-calibrated confidence scores that reflect the correctness of their answers. Existing calibration…
Deployed language models must decide not only what to answer but also when not to answer. We present UniCR, a unified framework that turns heterogeneous uncertainty evidence including sequence likelihoods, self-consistency dispersion,…
To deploy language models safely, it is crucial that they abstain from responding to inappropriate requests. Several prior studies test the safety promises of models based on their effectiveness in blocking malicious requests. In this work,…
Large language models often produce unsupported claims. We frame this as a misclassification error at the output boundary, where internally generated completions are emitted as if they were grounded in evidence. This motivates a composite…
Recent works have shown that language models (LM) capture different types of knowledge regarding facts or common sense. However, because no model is perfect, they still fail to provide appropriate answers in many cases. In this paper, we…
Machine-learning techniques are essential in modern collider research, yet their probabilistic outputs often lack calibrated uncertainty estimates and finite-sample guarantees, limiting their direct use in statistical inference and…
Large language models often generate confident but incorrect answers rather than abstaining when uncertain. This problem is particularly acute for small language models (SLMs), where computational constraints and autonomous operation…
Reliability of LLMs is questionable even as they get better at more tasks. A wider adoption of LLMs is contingent on whether they are usably factual. And if they are not, on whether they can properly calibrate their confidence in their…
Mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their reliable deployment. Existing methods typically fine-tune LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge scope. However, these methods often…
Constraint Programming (CP) has been successfully used to model and solve complex combinatorial problems. However, modeling is often not trivial and requires expertise, which is a bottleneck to wider adoption. In Constraint Acquisition…
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning with self-consistency improves performance by aggregating multiple sampled reasoning paths. In this setting, correctness is no longer tied to a single reasoning trace but to the aggregation rule over a pool…
For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed, models must effectively know when not to answer: abstain. Reasoning models, in particular, have gained attention for impressive performance on complex tasks. However, reasoning…
Conformal prediction (CP) and its extension, conformal risk control (CRC), are established frameworks for quantifying uncertainty in supervised machine learning through formal guarantees. However, recent breakthroughs in artificial…
To avoid giving wrong answers, question answering (QA) models need to know when to abstain from answering. Moreover, users often ask questions that diverge from the model's training data, making errors more likely and thus abstention more…
We present a formal problem formulation for \textit{Reliable} Audio-Visual Question Answering ($\mathcal{R}$-AVQA), where we prefer abstention over answering incorrectly. While recent AVQA models have high accuracy, their ability to…
Large language models (LLMs) rarely admit uncertainty, often producing fluent but misleading answers, rather than abstaining (i.e., refusing to answer). This weakness is even evident in temporal question answering, where models frequently…
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous domains with their impressive performance but still face their challenges. A predominant issue is the propensity for these models to generate non-existent facts, a concern termed…
Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling K responses yields a belief state - responses a model deems plausible. Existing work exploits this…
Machine learning (ML) models always make a prediction, even when they are likely to be wrong. This causes problems in practical applications, as we do not know if we should trust a prediction. ML with reject option addresses this issue by…
Despite advances in Visual Question Answering (VQA), the ability of models to assess their own correctness remains underexplored. Recent work has shown that VQA models, out-of-the-box, can have difficulties abstaining from answering when…