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Related papers: Tracing Uncertainty in Language Model "Reasoning"

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Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong reasoning performance by emitting long chains of thought. Yet, these verbose traces slow down inference and often drift into unnecessary detail, known as the overthinking phenomenon. To better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Ming Li , Zhengyuan Yang , Xiyao Wang , Dianqi Li , Kevin Lin , Tianyi Zhou , Lijuan Wang

In many natural language processing (NLP) tasks the same input (e.g. source sentence) can have multiple possible outputs (e.g. translations). To analyze how this ambiguity (also known as intrinsic uncertainty) shapes the distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-04 Felix Stahlberg , Ilia Kulikov , Shankar Kumar

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been demonstrated as an effective technique for improving the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of code generation. However, existing CoT methods often exhibit a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Yuqi Zhu , Ge Li , Xue Jiang , Jia Li , Hong Mei , Zhi Jin , Yihong Dong

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require deductive reasoning, yet models frequently produce incorrect or redundant inference steps. We frame natural language inference as a search problem where the final answer is the valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Andreas Opedal , Francesco Ignazio Re , Abulhair Saparov , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Ryan Cotterell

Inference-time reasoning scaling has significantly advanced the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex problem-solving. A prevalent approach involves external search guided by Process Reward Models (PRMs). However, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Zeen Song , Zihao Ma , Wenwen Qiang , Changwen Zheng , Gang Hua

Chain-of-thought traces from large reasoning models can span tens of thousands of tokens, yet we lack a vocabulary for describing their internal structure. Previous methods developed to analyze chain-of-thought traces are either too rigid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Daniel Lee , Owen Queen , James Zou

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted in an increasingly wide range of applications, user-model interactions have grown in both frequency and scale. Consequently, research has focused on evaluating the robustness of LLMs, an essential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Jiahang He , Rishi Ramachandran , Neel Ramachandran , Aryan Katakam , Kevin Zhu , Sunishchal Dev , Ashwinee Panda , Aryan Shrivastava

Vision-Language Models like GPT-4, LLaVA, and CogVLM have surged in popularity recently due to their impressive performance in several vision-language tasks. Current evaluation methods, however, overlook an essential component: uncertainty,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Vasily Kostumov , Bulat Nutfullin , Oleg Pilipenko , Eugene Ilyushin

We study the feasibility of identifying epistemic uncertainty (reflecting a lack of knowledge), as opposed to aleatoric uncertainty (reflecting entropy in the underlying distribution), in the outputs of large language models (LLMs) over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Gustaf Ahdritz , Tian Qin , Nikhil Vyas , Boaz Barak , Benjamin L. Edelman

The maximum softmax probability (MSP) represents a default approach when evaluating uncertainty quantification for language model generation with structured output. Although cheap, it is often miscalibrated. Methods that probe the model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Aliai Eusebi , Alexander Herzog , Xiaoyu Liang , Marie Vasek , Enrico Mariconti , Lorenzo Cavallaro

Long-context handling remains a core challenge for language models: even with extended context windows, models often fail to reliably extract, reason over, and use the information across long contexts. Recent works like Recursive Language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Keivan Alizadeh , Parshin Shojaee , Minsik Cho , Mehrdad Farajtabar

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

Recent advances in Large Language Models have led to Large Reasoning Models, which produce step-by-step reasoning traces. These traces offer insight into how models think and their goals, improving explainability and helping users follow…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Ludwig Felder , Jacob Miller , Markus Wallinger , Stephen Kobourov , Chunyang Chen

We present a practical framework for detecting errors in LLM-generated SQL by estimating uncertainty at the level of individual nodes in the query's abstract syntax tree (AST). Our approach proceeds in two stages. First, we introduce a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Hilaf Hasson , Ruocheng Guo

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks, particularly when prompted to generate intermediate explanations. However, it remains an open question whether these intermediate reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Moritz Miller , Kumar Shridhar

Many challenging reasoning tasks require not just rapid, intuitive responses, but a more deliberate, multi-step approach. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights an important shift from the "System 1" way of quick…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Guizhen Chen , Weiwen Xu , Hao Zhang , Hou Pong Chan , Chaoqun Liu , Lidong Bing , Deli Zhao , Anh Tuan Luu , Yu Rong

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating long chains of thought, but longer traces always introduce redundant or ineffective reasoning steps. One typical behavior is that they often perform unnecessary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Jinyi Han , Zixiang Di , Zishang Jiang , Ying Liao , Jiaqing Liang , Yongqi Wang , Yanghua Xiao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex tasks that require extended reasoning. In such settings, models often benefit from diverse chains-of-thought to arrive at multiple candidate solutions. This requires two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Xueyan Li , Guinan Su , Mrinmaya Sachan , Jonas Geiping

Reasoning-oriented large language models (RLMs) achieve strong gains on tasks such as mathematics and coding by generating explicit intermediate reasoning. However, their impact on machine translation (MT) remains underexplored. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Sara Rajaee , Sebastian Vincent , Alexandre Berard , Marzieh Fadaee , Kelly Marchisio , Tom Kocmi