Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

Do LLMs estimate uncertainty well in instruction-following?

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2410.14582 v4 pith:GAPDGOPR submitted 2024-10-18 cs.AI cs.CL

classification cs.AIcs.CL
keywords uncertaintyinstruction-followingllmsestimationevaluationmethodsmodelsacross
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Large language models (LLMs) could be valuable personal AI agents across various domains, provided they can precisely follow user instructions. However, recent studies have shown significant limitations in LLMs' instruction-following capabilities, raising concerns about their reliability in high-stakes applications. Accurately estimating LLMs' uncertainty in adhering to instructions is critical to mitigating deployment risks. We present, to our knowledge, the first systematic evaluation of the uncertainty estimation abilities of LLMs in the context of instruction-following. Our study identifies key challenges with existing instruction-following benchmarks, where multiple factors are entangled with uncertainty stems from instruction-following, complicating the isolation and comparison across methods and models. To address these issues, we introduce a controlled evaluation setup with two benchmark versions of data, enabling a comprehensive comparison of uncertainty estimation methods under various conditions. Our findings show that existing uncertainty methods struggle, particularly when models make subtle errors in instruction following. While internal model states provide some improvement, they remain inadequate in more complex scenarios. The insights from our controlled evaluation setups provide a crucial understanding of LLMs' limitations and potential for uncertainty estimation in instruction-following tasks, paving the way for more trustworthy AI agents.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    LLMs exhibit epistemically vacuous confidence on clinical tabular data, but cross-model attribution divergence with XGBoost enables a calibrator that reduces expected calibration error from 0.254 to 0.080.

  2. CLSGen: A Dual-Head Fine-Tuning Framework for Joint Probabilistic Classification and Verbalized Explanation

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    CLSGen is a dual-head LLM fine-tuning framework that enables joint probabilistic classification and verbalized explanation generation without catastrophic forgetting of generative capabilities.

  3. Decoupling Reasoning and Confidence: Resurrecting Calibration in Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    DCPO decouples reasoning optimization from calibration in RLVR to fix overconfidence in LLMs without losing accuracy.

  4. Decoupling Reasoning and Confidence: Resurrecting Calibration in Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    DCPO decouples reasoning and calibration in RLVR, matching GRPO accuracy while reducing overconfidence via a claimed fundamental gradient conflict.

  5. Online In-Context Distillation for Low-Resource Vision Language Models

    cs.CV 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    Online In-Context Distillation lets small VLMs gain up to 33% performance with as little as 4% teacher annotations by distilling knowledge through dynamic in-context demonstrations at inference.

  6. Uncertainty Under the Curve: A Sequence-Level Entropy Area Metric for Reasoning LLM

    cs.AI 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Entropy Area Score sums token-level predictive entropy across a reasoning sequence, correlates with answer entropy, and selects SFT training data better than Pass Rate filtering in limited AIME experiments.

Pith tools