Papers with uncertainty estimation
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to rank documents in decreasing order of their probability of relevance are not well calibrated and have several sources of uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to calibrate deterministic neural rankers for conversational search problems . they then use two techniques to model the uncertainty of neural ranker's uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed rankers output a predictive distribution of relevance as opposed to point estimates. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using model uncertainty as supervision for deciding when to ask may not be the most effective way to resolve model uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate clarification questions based on model uncertainty estimation and compare it to several alternatives to generate questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the model uncertainty of a collaborative dialogue task and shows that it is more effective than other alternatives. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Out-of-scope (OOS) intent detection is critical in task-oriented dialogue systems . without effective OOS detection, such inputs could lead to incorrect responses, reduced user trust, and eventual system failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that combines uncertainty modeling with fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) their method yields state-of-the-art results on key OOS detection benchmarks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields state-of-the-art results on key OOS detection benchmarks including real-world OOS data. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multitask dense retrieval are not effective due to corpus inconsistency. |
| Approach: | They propose to train individual dense passage retrievers for different open-domain question-answering tasks and aggregate their predictions during test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 benchmark QA datasets, with up to 10% improvement in top-100 accuracy compared to a joint-training multi-task DPR on SQuAD. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art classification and regression models are often not well calibrated and can be inaccurate. |
| Approach: | They quantify calibration of pre- trained language models for text regression . they apply uncertainty estimates to augment training data in low-resource domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model calibrations improve performance and generalizability in low-resource settings. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for event temporal relation extraction are based on data-driven machine learning . however, TEMPREL extraction is not accurate under distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct counterfactual analysis to attenuate the effects of two types of training biases: the event trigger bias and the frequent label bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts TempRel and timelines more faithfully compared to SOTA methods . it is based on two perspectives: one is to extract genuinely based upon contextual description . the other is to provide proper uncertainty estimation and abstain from extraction when no relation is described in the text . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | evaluators of machine translation systems often use text-based metrics to evaluate performance . however, these metrics lack semantic-level information and exhibit poor correlation with human ratings . authors propose a method to reduce inference bias of neural metrics in out-of-distribution data . |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce inference bias by using uncertainty estimation, test-time adaptation, and inference to reduce model uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model uncertainty and improves correlation performance across models. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to quantify uncertainty are limited in vision-language models . however, current models display notable miscalibration across diverse tasks and settings . |
| Approach: | They evaluate verbalized confidence in vision-language models using visual reasoning . they propose a prompting strategy that improves confidence alignment in multimodal settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves confidence alignment across multimodal settings. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Model calibration is commonly used as a proxy for reliability, but low calibration error does not necessarily imply reliable decision rules. |
| Approach: | They investigate the calibration error gap in generative language models using the TOFU benchmark and attribution-based shortcut detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model calibrations achieve low calibration error compared to pretrained models and retain low calibration despite reduced accuracy on the forget split. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) systems focus on improving model performance, ignoring the need to quantify model uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce two uncertainty-guided loss terms to the conventional EDL and a series of uncertainty-guiding training strategies to solve these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better OOV/OOD detection performance and generalization ability on OOV entities compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that incorporating utterances without majority-agreed labels into an additional class reduces the classification performance of the other emotion classes. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine utterances without majority-agreed labels into an additional class . they propose to quantify uncertainty in emotion classification using evidential deep learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method retains classification accuracy while effectively detects ambiguous emotion expressions. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that learning from individual annotations outperforms learning from aggregated labels, though they require a considerable amount of annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-head model to learn from disagreements in an active learning setting to identify annotators with a single head. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a single-head model in terms of uncertainty estimation and prediction while saving 70% of the annotation budget. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Obtaining reliable uncertainty estimations for such neural networks (NNs) is challenging due to the huge number of parameters in these deep learning models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Monte Carlo dropout to estimate uncertainty for Transformer-based models and construct inexpensive estimates using Determinantal Point Processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed estimates improve the quality of detection of error-prone instances. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition tasks are often suboptimal for NER . previous work focused on UE-NER, which estimates uncertainty scores for ner . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Sequential Labeling Posterior Network to estimate uncertainty for NER . they propose to consider wrong-span cases and to evaluate the specificity of wrong-pan cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on three datasets and AUPR on MIT-Restaurant datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Several natural language processing methods have been used to extract interactions between chemicals and proteins from biomedical text data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract chemical–protein interactions from biomedical text data . they use a pre-trained language-understanding model and calibration techniques to estimate uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Biocreative VI ChemProt task while preserving higher calibration abilities. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that supervised training is still necessary for complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate uncertainty-based active learning and LoRA to effectively integrate the two methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models on three reasoning tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing uncertainty metrics for LLM search methods do not capture the diverse types of uncertainty needed to guide different optimization goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for uncertainty benchmarking that captures four different uncertainty types . the uncertainty types Answer, Correctness, Aleatoric, and Epistemic serve different optimization goals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies four different uncertainty types . the uncertainty types serve different optimization goals in LLM search . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing supervised methods treat word sense disambiguation as a classification task but ignore uncertainty estimation (UE) in the real-world setting, the data is always noisy and out of distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose to use word sense disambiguation to determine an appropriate sense for a word given its context to determine the most appropriate sense. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reflects data uncertainty satisfactorily but underestimates model uncertainty. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for uncertainty estimation are inadequate for safety-critical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses the distances from neighbors and the ratio of labels in neighbors to estimate uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline and density-based methods in calibration and uncertainty metrics. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models lack specific task alignment and large-scale simulations are challenging due to their ambiguity, noise and massive volume. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages user feedback in RSs with advanced LLM capabilities to generate high-quality simulation data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the alignment with human preferences and in-domain reasoning capabilities of the fine-tuned LLMs. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing calibration methods rely on the assumption that consensus implies correctness . Existing methods fail under systematic errors, leading to miscalibrated high-confidence predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical calibration framework that measures confidence at two levels . they propose sensitivity analysis to measure local curvature of deductive process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework de-saturates overconfident errors and improves selective generation performance on OOD benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2019; Lewis e t al, 2019) show that Bayesian summarization methods can generate high quality summaries but suffer from a couple of issues when inputs lie far from the training data distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend state-of-the-art summarization models with Monte Carlo dropout and perform multiple stochastic forward passes to approximate Bayesian inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms deterministic summarization models on multiple benchmark datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Semi-supervised dialogue summarization (SSDS) leverages model-generated summaries to reduce reliance on human-labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a scoring approach that encapsulates three primary dimensions of summarization model quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces reliance on human-labeled data and improves the performance of summarization models. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive text summarization (ATS) requires a long document and short summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a query strategy for AL in abstractive text summarization that uses uncertainty estimation to reduce model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed query strategy improves ROUGE and consistency scores for annotated datasets . it also increases the performance of the model, compared to passive annotation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Effective human-machine collaboration requires machine learning models to externalize uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalization of the definition of sycophancy bias and a new algorithm to account for scophancies in uncertainty estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can account for sycophancy in uncertainty estimation process. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods show poor performance under Far Boundary (FB) adversarial examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a new technique to detect adversarial examples based on data and model uncertainty to outperform existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 3.6 and 6.0 AUC points under each scenario. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-trained language models rely on noisy data, which can be expensive if all parameters are updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training framework that incorporates Monte Carlo dropouts into the model and judiciously selects reliable pseudo-labeled examples based on confidence and certainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and efficiency over multiple tasks over multiple datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for uncertainty quantification fail to capture multifaceted nature of natural language generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-resource Uncertainty Quantification framework that integrates heterogeneous uncertainty signals into a unified measure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on CoQA, NQ_Open, and HotpotQA. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance . we propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-learning framework that utilizes unlabeled data of target languages to select silver labels for cross-lingual transfer tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two cross-lingual tasks by 10 F1 on average and 2.5 accuracy on natural language inference (NLI). |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural scaling laws define a predictable relationship between a model’s parameter count and its performance after training in the form of a power law. |
| Approach: | They perform an empirical investigation of language understanding tasks and evaluate their results to determine whether scaling laws can be used to accelerate model development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws can be exploited for debugging convergence when training large models, and can predict the performance of larger models. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text classification tasks are inherently ambiguous and can cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty to estimate toxicity detection errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for toxicity detection and other ambiguous text classification tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for graph processing rely on assumptions about data relations that are inadequate when handling large and complex graph data. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model enhanced by an uncertainty-aware module to provide a confidence score on the generated graph data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms by a substantial margin on ten datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Decoding strategies affect the probability distribution underlying the output of a language model and can therefore affect both generation quality and uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of decoding strategies on uncertainty estimation in large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the uncertainty estimation of large language models by reducing repetition. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text summarization is a key natural language generation task, but the high cost of inaccurate summaries raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarisation (UE-TS) evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a UE-TS benchmark that evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Direct prompting fails to detect ambiguity while linear probes can decode ambiguities with high accuracy, sometimes exceeding 90%. |
| Approach: | They introduce an adversarial ambiguity dataset that includes syntactic, lexical, and phonological ambiguities along with adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes syntactic, lexical, and phonological ambiguities along with adversarial variations. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new study examines the ability of large language models to self-monitor and ask for human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal analysis of LLM self-reflection for uncertainty estimation using domain adaptation theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and human interpretation on reasoning tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key task in NLP to find mentions of named entities and classify them into predefined categories. |
| Approach: | They investigated the impact of data augmentation on confidence calibration and uncertainty estimation in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. |
| Outcome: | The data augmentation improves calibration and uncertainty in cross-genre and cross-lingual setting, especially in-domain setting. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but could produce biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct extensive experimental evaluations of LLM uncertainty estimation methods . large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could produce biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses . a lack of comprehensive surveys on LLM uncertainty estimation is a problem . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Quantifying epistemic uncertainty in open-ended tasks is challenging due to the presence of aleatoric uncertainty, which arises from multiple valid answers. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments on visual question answering tasks and find that mitigating prompt-introduced bias improves uncertainty quantification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces uncertainty quantification in visual question answering tasks by mitigating prompt-introduced biases. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in handling a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that employs a lightweight model trained on data aligned with the target LLM’s performance to adjust uncertainty scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves improvements of up to 60% over existing methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) uses few-shot labeled examples to perform selective annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that incorporates uncertainty sampling into selective annotation for ICL . CoverICL builds a nearest-neighbor graph based on the semantic similarity between candidate ICL examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods for low-budget active learning (AL) it is up to 2x more budget-efficient than SOTA methods for high-budge AL. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-agent debates can improve the accuracy of Large Language Models by having multiple agents discuss solutions over several rounds of debate. |
| Approach: | a debate framework that uses uncertainty metrics to assess agent confidence is proposed . the framework uses textual prompts or a modified attention mechanism that adjusts token weights . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses agent confidence using uncertainty metrics . the framework is available at https://github.com/lukeyoffe/debunc. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to selecting reliable responses from multiple LLMs often depend on external verifiers, human evaluators, or self-consistency techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibrated log-likelihood-based selection framework to improve multi-LLM performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms majority voting and exceeds self-consistency performance when using a large number of model calls. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Accurate Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is critical for reliable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly decouples FFN and Attention contributions via noise-induced causal interventions to capture model's internal fragility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both uncertainty estimation and calibration while exhibiting superior cross-dataset generalization. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to estimate uncertainty use predictive confidence, structural characteristics of representation space, or stochastic variation in model outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a new uncertainty estimation framework based on sparse dictionary learning by identifying dictionary atoms associated with misclassified samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms or matches existing methods on several NLU benchmarks and sentiment analysis benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit systematic biases across demographic groups. |
| Approach: | They propose to use auditing as uncertainty estimation over a fairness metric . they propose to introduce the Bounded Active Fairness Auditor for query-efficient auditing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed auditing tool reduces query access costs and improves performance over time. |