Related papers: Inducing Artificial Uncertainty in Language Models

As natural language becomes the default interface for human-AI interaction, there is a need for LMs to appropriately communicate uncertainties in downstream applications. In this work, we investigate how LMs incorporate confidence in…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multi-turn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) becomes critical for safe and effective use. Most existing UQ approaches for language models aim to produce a…

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…

Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to various domains, concerns regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs in safety-critical scenarios have been raised, due to their unpredictable tendency to hallucinate and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely employed in programming language analysis to enhance human productivity. Yet, their reliability can be compromised by various code distribution shifts, leading to inconsistent outputs. While…

Prompt optimization algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in multi-step reasoning but still lack effective uncertainty estimation. This paper introduces a benchmark dataset to evaluate uncertainty metrics, focusing on Answer,…

Modelling uncertainty in Machine Learning models is essential for achieving safe and reliable predictions. Most research on uncertainty focuses on output uncertainty (predictions), but minimal attention is paid to uncertainty at inputs. We…

Most machine learning techniques are based upon statistical learning theory, often simplified for the sake of computing speed. This paper is focused on the uncertainty aspect of mathematical modeling in machine learning. Regression analysis…

The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to produce very high-quality tests and responses to our queries. But how much can we trust this generated text? In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty quantification in LLMs. We propose a…

As large language models continue to be widely developed, robust uncertainty quantification techniques will become crucial for their safe deployment in high-stakes scenarios. In this work, we explore how conformal prediction can be used to…

Uncertainty calibration is crucial for various machine learning applications, yet it remains challenging. Many models exhibit hallucinations - confident yet inaccurate responses - due to miscalibrated confidence. Here, we show that the…

We introduce a method to measure uncertainty in large language models. For tasks like question answering, it is essential to know when we can trust the natural language outputs of foundation models. We show that measuring uncertainty in…

The inability to correctly resolve rumours circulating online can have harmful real-world consequences. We present a method for incorporating model and data uncertainty estimates into natural language processing models for automatic rumour…

Recent advances in handling long sequences have facilitated the exploration of long-context in-context learning (ICL). While much of the existing research emphasizes performance improvements driven by additional in-context examples, the…

We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…

Assessing response quality to instructions in language models is vital but challenging due to the complexity of human language across different contexts. This complexity often results in ambiguous or inconsistent interpretations, making…