Papers with uncertainty estimation methods
Detecting Hallucinations in Large Language Models via Internal Attention Divergence Signals (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods conflate fluency with correctness or require substantial computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-pass uncertainty quantification method that uses attention matrices to estimate uncertainty without requiring repeated sampling or external models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well across multiple datasets, task types, and model families and is highly predictive of answer correctness. |
Mind the Gap: Benchmarking LLM Uncertainty and Calibration with Specialty-Aware Clinical QA and Reasoning-Based Behavioural Features (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential when employing large language models in high-risk domains such as clinical question answering (QA). |
| Approach: | They evaluate uncertainty estimation methods for clinical question answering using eleven clinical specialties and six question types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on behavioral features derived from reasoning-oriented models and examines conformal prediction as a complementary set-based approach. |
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Qiwei Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Huaxiu Yao, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Xujiang Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over multi-step decision-making process and dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 20%. |
Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Several neural-based metrics have been proposed to evaluate machine translation quality, but they are trained on noisy, biased and scarce human judgements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate machine translation quality using point estimates . they combine COMET framework with Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well across multiple language pairs and with references. |
UBench: Benchmarking Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Multiple Choice Questions (2025.findings-acl)
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Xunzhi Wang, Zhuowei Zhang, Gaonan Chen, Qiongyu Li, Bitong Luo, Zhixin Han, Haotian Wang, Zhiyu Li, Hang Gao, Mengting Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for benchmarking the uncertainty of large language models face challenges . existing methods require internal model access, additional training, or high computational costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark for evaluating the uncertainty of large language models based on confidence intervals . UBench encompasses 11,978 multiple choice questions spanning knowledge, language, understanding, and reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for benchmarking the uncertainty of large language models. |
Hybrid Uncertainty Quantification for Selective Text Classification in Ambiguous Tasks (2023.acl-long)
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Artem Vazhentsev, Gleb Kuzmin, Akim Tsvigun, Alexander Panchenko, Maxim Panov, Mikhail Burtsev, Artem Shelmanov
| 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. |
Don’t Go To Extremes: Revealing the Excessive Sensitivity and Calibration Limitations of LLMs in Implicit Hate Speech Detection (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Several studies have examined whether large language models exhibit bias or discrimination against individuals or groups in terms of protected attributes like race, gender, or religion. |
| Approach: | They evaluate LLMs' ability to detect implicit hate speech and express confidence in their responses by considering prompt patterns and mainstream uncertainty estimation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models exhibit two extremes: (1) excessive sensitivity towards groups or topics that may cause fairness issues, resulting in misclassifying benign statements as hate speech; (2) confidence scores for each method excessively concentrate on a fixed range, remaining unchanged regardless of the dataset’s complexity. |
Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |