# What Is a Clarification? Estimating Model-Dependent Input Ambiguity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20052/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [AmbigQA: Answering Ambiguous Open-domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10645/) (2020)
- [We're Afraid Language Models Aren't Modeling Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14399/) (2023)
- [Decomposing Uncertainty for Large Language Models through Input Clarification Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08718/) (2023)
- [Clarify When Necessary: Resolving Ambiguity Through Interaction with LMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09469/) (2023)
- [Modeling Future Conversation Turns to Teach LLMs to Ask Clarifying Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13788/) (2024)
- [Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14613/) (2023)
- [Learning to Clarify: Multi-turn Conversations with Action-Based Contrastive Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00222/) (2024)
- [Aligning Language Models to Explicitly Handle Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11972/) (2024)
- [CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12063/) (2024)
- [Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14696/) (2023)
- [AMBROSIA: A Benchmark for Parsing Ambiguous Questions into Database Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19073/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and Improving Text-to-SQL Generation under Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13659/) (2023)
- [Position: Uncertainty Quantification Needs Reassessment for Large-language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22655/) (2025)
- [Asking Clarification Questions to Handle Ambiguity in Open-Domain QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13808/) (2023)
- [The Illusion of Certainty: Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs Fails under Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04418/) (2025)
- [Disambiguate First, Parse Later: Generating Interpretations for Ambiguity Resolution in Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18448/) (2025)
- [Fine-Grained Uncertainty Decomposition in Large Language Models: A Spectral Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22272/) (2025)
- [Reasoning about Intent for Ambiguous Requests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10453/) (2025)
- [Task-Awareness Improves LLM Generations and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21500/) (2026)
- [Disentangling Ambiguity from Instability in Large Language Models: A Clinical Text-to-SQL Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12015/) (2026)
- [Knowing but Not Showing: LLMs Recognize Ambiguity but Rarely Ask Clarifying Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25284/) (2026)
- [Clarify, Abstain or Answer? Strategising in Conversation with Belief-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25831/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ambiguous inputs can admit multiple interpretations, each potentially yielding a different answer. Existing work largely treats this ambiguity as a property of the input, yet for a particular language model, only some alternatives may be known and answerable. We therefore distinguish world ambiguity, capturing all alternatives admitted by an input, from model ambiguity, capturing those accessible to the responding model. To characterize these alternatives, we formalize natural-language clarifications through three desiderata: uniqueness, faithfulness, and answer equivalence. We show that these desiderata induce a one-to-one correspondence between valid answers and equivalence classes of clarifications, implying that any interpretation can be represented either by its answer or by the clarifications that uniquely express it. We leverage this correspondence to introduce circleclar, a black-box method that estimates the set of answers available to a model by checking consistency along an answer--clarification--answer cycle. Across open-domain QA and executable Text-to-SQL, circleclar achieves strong recovery of these answer sets. In QA, the recovered support yields the strongest overall performance in model-dependent ambiguity detection and enables effective selection among answering, clarifying, and abstaining. Together, these results demonstrate the practical value of a model-dependent view of ambiguity and its characterization through an answer-clarification correspondence.