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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

When a system commits to a hypothesis, much of the evidential structure behind that commitment is lost to compression. Standard accounts assume that selected content and scalar confidence suffice for downstream control. This paper argues…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mark Walsh

A reliable deep learning system should be able to accurately express its confidence with respect to its predictions, a quality known as calibration. One of the most effective ways to produce reliable confidence estimates with a pre-trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Thomas P. Zollo , Zhun Deng , Jake C. Snell , Toniann Pitassi , Richard Zemel

Current alignment evaluation mostly measures whether models encode dangerous concepts and whether they refuse harmful requests. Both miss the layer where alignment often operates: routing from concept detection to behavioral policy. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Gregory N. Frank

Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Vaibhav Adlakha , Parishad BehnamGhader , Xing Han Lu , Nicholas Meade , Siva Reddy

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized automated code generation. One serious concern, however, is the so-called ``hallucination'', i.e., LLMs may generate seemingly plausible but functionally incorrect code. In this paper, we…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yanke Zhou , Yuhao Tan , Senrong Xu , Zenan Li , Yuan Yao , Taolue Chen , Xiaoxing Ma

The zero-shot chain of thought (CoT) approach is often used in question answering (QA) by language models (LMs) for tasks that require multiple reasoning steps. However, some QA tasks hinge more on accessing relevant knowledge than on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jiacan Yu , Hannah An , Lenhart K. Schubert

Conformal prediction is a valuable tool for quantifying predictive uncertainty of machine learning models. However, its applicability relies on the assumption of data exchangeability, a condition which is often not met in real-world…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-30 Aleksandr Podkopaev , Darren Xu , Kuang-Chih Lee

Conformal Prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with guaranteed coverage, but its reliance on a single global calibration threshold obscures the sources of uncertainty at the instance level. In particular, it conflates…

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve impressive performance on multimodal tasks but often suffer from hallucination, and confidently describe objects or attributes not present in the image. Current training-free interventions…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Mehrdad Fazli , Bowen Wei , Ahmet Sari , Ziwei Zhu

This work introduces a novel methodology for assessing catastrophic forgetting (CF) in continual learning. We propose a new conformal prediction (CP)-based metric, termed the Conformal Prediction Confidence Factor (CPCF), to quantify and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ioannis Pitsiorlas , Nour Jamoussi , Marios Kountouris

A trustworthy real-world prediction system should produce well-calibrated confidence scores; that is, its confidence in an answer should be indicative of the likelihood that the answer is correct, enabling deferral to an expert in cases of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Katherine Tian , Eric Mitchell , Allan Zhou , Archit Sharma , Rafael Rafailov , Huaxiu Yao , Chelsea Finn , Christopher D. Manning

Chat models without chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning must decide whether to refuse a harmful request before generating their first response token. Reasoning models, by contrast, produce extended chains of thought before their final output,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Kureha Yamaguchi , Benjamin Etheridge , Andy Arditi

Conformal Prediction (CP) allows to perform rigorous uncertainty quantification by constructing a prediction set $C(X)$ satisfying $\mathbb{P}(Y \in C(X))\geq 1-\alpha$ for a user-chosen $\alpha \in [0,1]$ by relying on calibration data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 David Stutz , Abhijit Guha Roy , Tatiana Matejovicova , Patricia Strachan , Ali Taylan Cemgil , Arnaud Doucet

Neural weather models have shown immense potential as inexpensive and accurate alternatives to physics-based models. However, most models trained to perform weather forecasting do not quantify the uncertainty associated with their…

Large language models (LLMs) are often queried multiple times at test time, with predictions aggregated by majority vote. While effective, this self-consistency strategy (arXiv:2203.11171) requires a fixed number of calls and can fail when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Ehsan Aghazadeh , Ahmad Ghasemi , Hedyeh Beyhaghi , Hossein Pishro-Nik

Large reasoning language models are typically run with fixed inference budgets, which can waste computation or terminate reasoning prematurely. We introduce Certainty-Guided Reasoning (CGR), a model-agnostic adaptive inference procedure…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 João Paulo Nogueira , Wentao Sun , Alonso Silva , Laith Zumot

As machine learning-based prediction systems are increasingly used in high-stakes situations, it is important to understand how such predictive models will perform upon deployment. Distribution-free uncertainty quantification techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jake C. Snell , Thomas L. Griffiths

Large language models often lose previously aligned safety behaviors when fine-tuned on benign data, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Prior work shows that adding random safety examples can mitigate this effect, but it remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Anh Pham , Mihir Thalanki , Michael Sun , Aditya Chaloo , Ankita Gupta , Tian Xia , Aditya Mate , Ehimwenma Nosakhare , Soundararajan Srinivasan