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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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Linwei Tao , Yi-Fan Yeh , Bo Kai , Minjing Dong , Tao Huang , Tom A. Lamb , Jialin Yu , Philip H. S. Torr , Chang Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities, yet selecting the most reliable response from multiple LLMs remains a challenge, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches often depend on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Aakriti Agrawal , Rohith Aralikatti , Anirudh Satheesh , Souradip Chakraborty , Amrit Singh Bedi , Furong Huang

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

Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Mobina Pournemat , Keivan Rezaei , Gaurang Sriramanan , Arman Zarei , Jiaxiang Fu , Yang Wang , Hamid Eghbalzadeh , Soheil Feizi

We develop a principled procedure for determining when a large language model (LLM) should abstain from responding (e.g., by saying "I don't know") in a general domain, instead of resorting to possibly "hallucinating" a non-sensical or…

Large language models (LLMs) have delivered significant breakthroughs across diverse domains but can still produce unreliable or misleading outputs, posing critical challenges for real-world applications. While many recent studies focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Yang Nan , Pengfei He , Ravi Tandon , Han Xu

Despite their impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit unwanted uncertainty, a phenomenon where a model changes a previously correct answer into an incorrect one when re-prompted. This behavior undermines trust and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Tiasa Singha Roy , Ayush Rajesh Jhaveri , Ilias Triantafyllopoulos

Recent work has shown that the hidden states of large language models contain signals useful for uncertainty estimation and hallucination detection, motivating a growing interest in efficient probe-based approaches. Yet it remains unclear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Joe Stacey , Hadas Orgad , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling , Nafise Sadat Moosavi

Accurately quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their reliable deployment, especially in high-stakes applications. Current state-of-the-art methods for measuring semantic uncertainty in LLMs rely on strict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Yashvir S. Grewal , Edwin V. Bonilla , Thang D. Bui

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong average performance yet remain unreliable at the instance level, with frequent hallucinations, brittle failures, and poorly calibrated confidence. We study reliability through the lens of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pranav Kallem

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

Trustworthy language models should abstain from answering questions when they do not know the answer. However, the answer to a question can be unknown for a variety of reasons. Prior research has focused on the case in which the question is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Jeremy R. Cole , Michael J. Q. Zhang , Daniel Gillick , Julian Martin Eisenschlos , Bhuwan Dhingra , Jacob Eisenstein

Although language model scores are often treated as probabilities, their reliability as probability estimators has mainly been studied through calibration, overlooking other aspects. In particular, it is unclear whether language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Eitan Wagner , Yuli Slavutsky , Omri Abend

Despite their impressive performance, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are known to pose important risks. One such set of risks arises from misplaced confidence, whether over-confidence or under-confidence, that the models have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Ke Shen , Mayank Kejriwal

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to \textit{abstain} when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yuxi Sun , Aoqi Zuo , Wei Gao , Jing Ma

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable fluency and competence across various natural language tasks. However, recent research has highlighted their sensitivity to variations in input prompts. To deploy LLMs in a safe and reliable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Harsh Raj , Vipul Gupta , Domenic Rosati , Subhabrata Majumdar

Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce surprisingly sophisticated estimates of their own uncertainty. However, it remains unclear to what extent this expressed confidence is tied to the reasoning, knowledge, or decision making of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Jiawei Wang , Yanfei Zhou , Siddartha Devic , Deqing Fu

Despite the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains, they frequently exhibit overconfidence when encountering uncertain scenarios, yet existing solutions primarily rely on evasive responses (e.g., "I…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyu Liu , Jingquan Peng , xiaopeng Wu , Xubin Li , Tiezheng Ge , Bo Zheng , Yong Liu

As large language models (LLMs) often generate plausible but incorrect content, error detection has become increasingly critical to ensure truthfulness. However, existing detection methods often overlook a critical problem we term as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Hexiang Tan , Fei Sun , Sha Liu , Du Su , Qi Cao , Xin Chen , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Yuanzhuo Wang , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng