English
Related papers

Related papers: Second Guess: Detecting Uncertainty Through Absten…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for natural language generation in healthcare, but risk hallucinating factually incorrect information. Deploying LLMs for medical question answering necessitates reliable uncertainty estimation (UE)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Jiaxin Wu , Yizhou Yu , Hong-Yu Zhou

While Large language models (LLMs) have proved able to address some complex reasoning tasks, we also know that they are highly sensitive to input variation, which can lead to different solution paths and final answers. Answer consistency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Huiyuan Lai , Xiao Zhang , Malvina Nissim

We explore uncertainty quantification in large language models (LLMs), with the goal to identify when uncertainty in responses given a query is large. We simultaneously consider both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, where the former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Yasin Abbasi Yadkori , Ilja Kuzborskij , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such "hallucinations" persist even in state-of-the-art systems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Adam Tauman Kalai , Ofir Nachum , Santosh S. Vempala , Edwin Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Xin Qiu , Risto Miikkulainen

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in decision-making, but their reliability, especially in critical tasks like healthcare, is not well-established. Therefore, understanding how LLMs reason and make decisions is crucial for their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Ze Yu Zhang , Arun Verma , Finale Doshi-Velez , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing with their impressive reasoning and question-answering capabilities. However, these models are sometimes prone to generating credible-sounding but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ranganath Krishnan , Piyush Khanna , Omesh Tickoo

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on tasks ranging from visual question answering to video understanding. However, existing studies have concentrated mainly on visual-textual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Yunkai Dang , Mengxi Gao , Yibo Yan , Xin Zou , Yanggan Gu , Jungang Li , Jingyu Wang , Peijie Jiang , Aiwei Liu , Jia Liu , Xuming Hu

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance across diverse tasks by leveraging pre-trained (i.e., parametric) and external (i.e., contextual) knowledge. While substantial efforts have been made to enhance the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Hyuhng Joon Kim , Youna Kim , Sang-goo Lee , Taeuk Kim

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 language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

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

In order to be deployed safely, Large Language Models (LLMs) must be capable of dynamically adapting their behavior based on their level of knowledge and uncertainty associated with specific topics. This adaptive behavior, which we refer to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Alexandre Piché , Aristides Milios , Dzmitry Bahdanau , Chris Pal

Large language models (LLMs) often present answers with high apparent confidence despite lacking an explicit mechanism for reasoning about certainty or truth. While existing benchmarks primarily evaluate single-turn accuracy, truthfulness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Mohammadreza Saadat , Steve Nemzer

It is important for Large Language Models (LLMs) to be aware of the boundary of their knowledge, distinguishing queries they can confidently answer from those that lie beyond their capabilities. Such awareness enables models to perform…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Lihu Chen , Gerard de Melo , Fabian M. Suchanek , Gaël Varoquaux

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Gal Yona , Roee Aharoni , Mor Geva

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strikingly conflicting behaviors: they can appear steadfastly overconfident in their initial answers whilst at the same time being prone to excessive doubt when challenged. To investigate this apparent…

While the Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate a majority of language understanding tasks, previous work shows that some of these results are supported by modelling spurious correlations of training datasets. Authors commonly assess model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Lukáš Mikula , Michal Štefánik , Marek Petrovič , Petr Sojka

Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation. However, as LMs often generate incorrect or hallucinated responses, it is crucial to correctly quantify their uncertainty in responding to given inputs.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Xinmeng Huang , Shuo Li , Mengxin Yu , Matteo Sesia , Hamed Hassani , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani , Edgar Dobriban

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in information-seeking and decision-making tasks. Despite their broad utility, LLMs tend to generate information that conflicts with real-world facts, and their persuasive style can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Arslan Chaudhry , Sridhar Thiagarajan , Dilan Gorur