mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Towards Uncertainty-Aware Language Agent

arXiv 2401.14016 ↗First posted 25 Jan 2024cs.CLcited by 29

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

While Language Agents have achieved promising success by placing Large Language Models at the core of a more versatile design that dynamically interacts with the external world, the existing approaches neglect the notion of uncertainty during these interactions. We present the Uncertainty-Aware Language Agent (UALA), a framework that orchestrates the interaction between the agent and the external world using uncertainty quantification. Compared with other well-known counterparts like ReAct, our extensive experiments across 3 representative tasks (HotpotQA, StrategyQA, MMLU) and various LLM sizes demonstrate that UALA brings a significant improvement of performance, while having a substantially lower reliance on the external world (i.e., reduced number of tool calls and tokens). Our analyses provide various insights including the great potential of UALA compared with agent fine-tuning, and underscore the unreliability of verbalised confidence of LLMs as a proxy for uncertainty.

Key facts. Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 36 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2024.

Builds on

36 of 48 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023FireAct: Toward Language Agent Fine-tuning9 Oct
  2. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey14 Sep
  3. 2023Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents5 Sep
  4. 2023SwiftSage: A Generative Agent with Fast and Slow Thinking for Complex Interactive Tasks27 May

Other references · 32

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  2. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  3. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  5. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,768
  6. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
  7. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,323
  8. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
  9. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
  10. 2019Language Models as Knowledge Bases?cited by 1,922
  11. 2022Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Knowcited by 1,783
  12. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,302
20 more
  1. 2022Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Taskscited by 1,057
  2. 2023Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generationcited by 795
  3. 2023Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedbackcited by 788
  4. 2023CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquingcited by 751
  5. 2021Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategiescited by 736
  6. 2022Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Wordscited by 731
  7. 2023Chameleon: Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 352
  8. 2023Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Plannerscited by 298
  9. 2023Generating with Confidence: Uncertainty Quantification for Black-box Large Language Modelscited by 286
  10. 2021On Hallucination and Predictive Uncertainty in Conditional Language Generationcited by 176
  11. 2023LM-Polygraph: Uncertainty Estimation for Language Modelscited by 130
  12. 2018Analyzing Uncertainty in Neural Machine Translationcited by 126
  13. 2022On Decoding Strategies for Neural Text Generatorscited by 89
  14. 2023CLIN: A Continually Learning Language Agent for Rapid Task Adaptation and Generalizationcited by 88
  15. 2023Making Language Models Better Tool Learners with Execution Feedbackcited by 69
  16. 2022Follow the Wisdom of the Crowd: Effective Text Generation via Minimum Bayes Risk Decodingcited by 54
  17. 2020Understanding Neural Abstractive Summarization Models via Uncertaintycited by 34
  18. 2023Improving the Reliability of Large Language Models by Leveraging Uncertainty-Aware In-Context Learningcited by 29
  19. 2023On Uncertainty Calibration and Selective Generation in Probabilistic Neural Summarization: A Benchmark Studycited by 25
  20. 2023POSQA: Probe the World Models of LLMs with Size Comparisonscited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 9; 2026: 18.

29 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025Maximizing Confidence Alone Improves Reasoningcited by 97
  2. 2024LUQ: Long-text Uncertainty Quantification for LLMscited by 79
  3. 2025Reasoning Models Better Express Their Confidencecited by 63
  4. 2026Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agents: Foundations, Emerging Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 15
  5. 2024SAUP: Situation Awareness Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agentcited by 14
  6. 2025ProactiveVA: Proactive Visual Analytics with LLM-Based UI Agentcited by 14
  7. 2026BackdoorAgent: A Unified Framework for Backdoor Attacks on LLM-based Agentscited by 12
  8. 2026Agentic Confidence Calibrationcited by 12
  9. 2025Towards Agents That Know When They Don't Know: Uncertainty as a Control Signal for Structured Reasoningcited by 10
  10. 2025Uncertainty Quantification for Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models: Foundations, Methodology, and Future Directionscited by 10
  11. 2025MAP: Multi-user Personalization with Collaborative LLM-powered Agentscited by 7
  12. 2025Stop Reducing Responsibility in LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Systems to Local Alignmentcited by 7
17 more
  1. 2026Agentic Design Patterns: A System-Theoretic Frameworkcited by 4
  2. 2025Comparing Uncertainty Measurement and Mitigation Methods for Large Language Models: A Systematic Reviewcited by 3
  3. 2026Uncertainty Decomposition for Clarification Seeking in LLM Agentscited by 3
  4. 2026Evaluating Confidence-Gated Retrieval with Matched Trajectory Replaycited by 3
  5. 2026UA-ChatDev: Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Agent Collaboration for Reliable Software Developmentcited by 2
  6. 2025Mission Impossible: Feedback-Guided Dynamic Interactive Planning for Improving Reasoning on LLMscited by 1
  7. 2026Helicase: Uncertainty-Guided Supply Chain Knowledge Graph Construction with Autonomous Multi-Agent LLMscited by 1
  8. 2026Strategic Decision Support for AI Agentscited by 1
  9. 2026Confidence Laundering in Agent Systems: Why Uncertainty Needs a Latent Carriercited by 1
  10. 2026SCoOP: Semantic Consistent Opinion Pooling for Uncertainty Quantification in Multiple Vision-Language Model Systemscited by 0
  11. 2026HawkesLLM: Semantic Uncertainty Propagation in Agentic Text Simulationcited by 0
  12. 2026Proper Scoring Rules for Agentic Uncertainty Quantificationcited by 0
  13. 2026From Sequence to Structure: Relational Uncertainty Propagation for LLM Agentscited by 0
  14. 2026CUSP: Decomposable Collective Uncertainty for Multi-Agent Multimodal Reasoningcited by 0
  15. 2026Epi-Logic: A Conceptual Framework for Epistemic Runtime Control, Schema Validity Checking, and Controlled Accommodation in Autonomous AI Agentscited by 0
  16. 2026CRC-Router: Risk-Constrained Routing for Medical Agentic AI Systemscited by 0
  17. 2026What Can Component-Replacement Evidence Establish? A Critical Scoping Review of Local Decisions in LLM Agentscited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2026Uncertainty Quantification for LLM Agents: A Taxonomy, an Evaluation Protocol, and an Empirical Study
  2. 2025Position: Uncertainty Quantification Needs Reassessment for Large-language Model Agents
  3. 2026CAR-bench: Evaluating the Consistency and Limit-Awareness of LLM Agents under Real-World Uncertainty
  4. 2026Uncertainty-Aware Clarification in LLM Agents with Information Gain
  5. 2026From Task Solving to Robust Real-World Adaptation in LLM Agents
  6. 2025Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges
  7. 2025Small Language Models for Agentic Systems: A Survey of Architectures, Capabilities, and Deployment Trade offs
  8. 2026From Passive Metric to Active Signal: The Evolving Role of Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models