Unconditional Truthfulness: Learning Unconditional Uncertainty of Large Language Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) has emerged as a promising approach for detecting hallucinations and low-quality output of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, obtaining proper uncertainty scores is complicated by the conditional dependency between the generation steps of an autoregressive LLM because it is hard to model it explicitly. Here, we propose to learn this dependency from attention-based features. In particular, we train a regression model that leverages LLM attention maps, probabilities on the current generation step, and recurrently computed uncertainty scores from previously generated tokens. To incorporate the recurrent features, we also suggest a two-staged training procedure. Our experimental evaluation on ten datasets and three LLMs shows that the proposed method is highly effective for selective generation, achieving substantial improvements over rivaling unsupervised and supervised approaches.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 38 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2024.
Builds on
38 of 66 references.
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26 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 8.
9 papers.
- 2025Efficient Hallucination Detection for LLMs Using Uncertainty-Aware Attention Headscited by 16
- 2026AGSC: Adaptive Granularity and Semantic Clustering for Uncertainty Quantification in Long-text Generationcited by 1
- 2026HIVE: Hidden-Evidence Verification for Hallucination Detection in Diffusion Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Failing to See or Failing to Know? Attributing Errors in Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgmentscited by 0
- 2026Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2026Evaluation Pitfalls and Sparsity Limitations in LLM-based Confidence Estimates for Classificationcited by 0
- 2026When Do Supervised UQ Ensembles Improve LLM Hallucination Detection? A Robustness Studycited by 0
- 2026ActMap: Single-Pass Uncertainty Quantification from Generation-Time Activation Mapscited by 0
- 2026ActMap: Single-Pass Uncertainty Quantification from Generation-Time Activation Maps10 Sep 2026
- 2026When Do Supervised UQ Ensembles Improve LLM Hallucination Detection? A Robustness Study25 Aug 2026
- 2026Evaluation Pitfalls and Sparsity Limitations in LLM-based Confidence Estimates for Classification5 Aug 2026
- 2026Failing to See or Failing to Know? Attributing Errors in Vision-Language Models6 Jul 2026
- 2026Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Diffusion Models14 May 2026
- 2026Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments5 May 2026
- 2026HIVE: Hidden-Evidence Verification for Hallucination Detection in Diffusion Large Language Models28 Apr 2026
- 2026AGSC: Adaptive Granularity and Semantic Clustering for Uncertainty Quantification in Long-text Generation8 Apr 2026
- 2025Efficient Hallucination Detection for LLMs Using Uncertainty-Aware Attention Heads26 May 2025