Exploring Predictive Uncertainty and Calibration in NLP: A Study on the Impact of Method & Data Scarcity
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Abstract (arXiv)
We investigate the problem of determining the predictive confidence (or, conversely, uncertainty) of a neural classifier through the lens of low-resource languages. By training models on sub-sampled datasets in three different languages, we assess the quality of estimates from a wide array of approaches and their dependence on the amount of available data. We find that while approaches based on pre-trained models and ensembles achieve the best results overall, the quality of uncertainty estimates can surprisingly suffer with more data. We also perform a qualitative analysis of uncertainties on sequences, discovering that a model's total uncertainty seems to be influenced to a large degree by its data uncertainty, not model uncertainty. All model implementations are open-sourced in a software package.
Key facts. Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Builds on 76 of its 126 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2022.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 2; 2024: 14; 2025: 1; 2026: 7.
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- 2026Quantifying the Uncertainty of Foundation Models with Singular Value Ensembles29 Jan 2026
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- 2024When Quantization Affects Confidence of Large Language Models?1 May 2024
- 2024How much reliable is ChatGPT's prediction on Information Extraction under Input Perturbations?7 Apr 2024
- 2024Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Only9 Mar 2024
- 2024API Is Enough: Conformal Prediction for Large Language Models Without Logit-Access2 Mar 2024
- 2024Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation?25 Feb 2024
- 2024Beyond Simple Averaging: Improving NLP Ensemble Performance with Topological-Data-Analysis-Based Weighting22 Feb 2024
- 2024Non-Exchangeable Conformal Language Generation with Nearest Neighbors1 Feb 2024
- 2023Uncertainty in Natural Language Generation: From Theory to Applications28 Jul 2023
- 2023Shifting Attention to Relevance: Towards the Predictive Uncertainty Quantification of Free-Form Large Language Models3 Jul 2023
- 2022A Close Look into the Calibration of Pre-trained Language Models31 Oct 2022
- 2023Shifting Attention to Relevance: Towards the Predictive Uncertainty Quantification of Free-Form Large Language Modelscited by 149
- 2024API Is Enough: Conformal Prediction for Large Language Models Without Logit-Accesscited by 69
- 2024Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Onlycited by 64
- 2023Uncertainty in Natural Language Generation: From Theory to Applicationscited by 61
- 2022A Close Look into the Calibration of Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 57
- 2024Do LLMs Know When to NOT Answer? Investigating Abstention Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 57
- 2024Non-Exchangeable Conformal Language Generation with Nearest Neighborscited by 21
- 2024Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation?cited by 15
- 2024Crowd-Calibrator: Can Annotator Disagreement Inform Calibration in Subjective Tasks?cited by 13
- 2024Graph-based Confidence Calibration for Large Language Modelscited by 10
- 2024On the State of NLP Approaches to Modeling Depression in Social Media: A Post-COVID-19 Outlookcited by 6
- 2024When Quantization Affects Confidence of Large Language Models?cited by 5
12 most cited of 23 All 23 (JSON)
- 2026Conformal Prediction with Paraphrase-Aware Scoring for LLM Uncertainty Quantification3 Oct 2026
- 2026When Surface Form Changes Moderation Decisions: A Paired Study of Code-Mixed Workflow Instability4 Jun 2026
- 2026Shared Doubt: Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Confidence Estimation for Language Models29 May 2026
- 2026Quantifying the Uncertainty of Foundation Models with Singular Value Ensembles29 Jan 2026
- 2026Calibration Is Not Enough: Evaluating Confidence Estimation Under Language Variations12 Jan 2026
- 2026On the Fallacy of Global Token Perplexity in Spoken Language Model Evaluation9 Jan 2026
- 2025The Capabilities and Limitations of Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Generalization and Calibration3 Feb 2025
- 2024Graph-based Confidence Calibration for Large Language Models3 Nov 2024
- 2024On the State of NLP Approaches to Modeling Depression in Social Media: A Post-COVID-19 Outlook11 Oct 2024
- 2024Crowd-Calibrator: Can Annotator Disagreement Inform Calibration in Subjective Tasks?26 Aug 2024
- 2024Do LLMs Know When to NOT Answer? Investigating Abstention Abilities of Large Language Models23 Jul 2024
- 2024Efficient Nearest Neighbor based Uncertainty Estimation for Natural Language Processing Tasks2 Jul 2024
12 newest of 23 All 23 (JSON)