Investigating Human-Aligned Large Language Model Uncertainty
Authors: name: Kyle Moore; name: Jesse Roberts; name: Daryl Watson; name: Pamela Wisniewski
Published: 2025-03-16 14:45:43

Abstract: Recent work has sought to quantify large language model uncertainty to
facilitate model control and modulate user trust. Previous works focus on
measures of uncertainty that are theoretically grounded or reflect the average
overt behavior of the model. In this work, we investigate a variety of
uncertainty measures, in order to identify measures that correlate with human
group-level uncertainty. We find that Bayesian measures and a variation on
entropy measures, top-k entropy, tend to agree with human behavior as a
function of model size. We find that some strong measures decrease in
human-similarity with model size, but, by multiple linear regression, we find
that combining multiple uncertainty measures provide comparable human-alignment
with reduced size-dependency.