Epistemic Artificial Intelligence is Essential for Machine Learning Models to Truly 'Know When They Do Not Know'
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Abstract (arXiv)
Despite AI's impressive achievements, including recent advances in generative and large language models, there remains a significant gap in the ability of AI systems to handle uncertainty and generalize beyond their training data. AI models consistently fail to make robust enough predictions when facing unfamiliar or adversarial data. Traditional machine learning approaches struggle to address this issue, due to an overemphasis on data fitting, while current uncertainty quantification approaches suffer from serious limitations. This position paper posits a paradigm shift towards epistemic artificial intelligence, emphasizing the need for models to learn from what they know while at the same time acknowledging their ignorance, using the mathematics of second-order uncertainty measures. This approach, which leverages the expressive power of such measures to efficiently manage uncertainty, offers an effective way to improve the resilience and robustness of AI systems, allowing them to better handle unpredictable real-world environments.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 119 of its 261 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 May 2025.
Builds on
119 of 261 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026Epistemic Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 4
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- 2026Credal Large Language Models for Semantic Commitment under Uncertaintycited by 2
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- 2026What Intermediate Layers Know: Detecting Jailbreaks from Entropy Dynamicscited by 1
- 2026Decision-Aligned Evaluation of Uncertainty Quantificationcited by 1
- 2026Conformalised imprecise inference for robust extrapolation under limited datacited by 0
- 2026XU-RS: Explaining Credal Width in Random-Set Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026XU-RS: Explaining Credal Width in Random-Set Language Models29 Sep 2026
- 2026Credal Large Language Models for Semantic Commitment under Uncertainty24 Aug 2026
- 2026Decision-Aligned Evaluation of Uncertainty Quantification25 Jun 2026
- 2026What Intermediate Layers Know: Detecting Jailbreaks from Entropy Dynamics23 Jun 2026
- 2026A formal definition and meta-model for a machine theory of mind2 Jun 2026
- 2026Conformalised imprecise inference for robust extrapolation under limited data25 May 2026
- 2026Statistical inference with belief functions: A survey8 May 2026
- 2026Epistemic Generative Adversarial Networks18 Mar 2026