When an LLM is apprehensive about its answers -- and when its
  uncertainty is justified
Authors: name: Petr Sychev; name: Andrey Goncharov; name: Daniil Vyazhev; name: Edvard Khalafyan; name: Alexey Zaytsev
Published: 2025-03-03 16:03:46

Abstract: Uncertainty estimation is crucial for evaluating Large Language Models
(LLMs), particularly in high-stakes domains where incorrect answers result in
significant consequences. Numerous approaches consider this problem, while
focusing on a specific type of uncertainty, ignoring others. We investigate
what estimates, specifically token-wise entropy and model-as-judge (MASJ),
would work for multiple-choice question-answering tasks for different question
topics. Our experiments consider three LLMs: Phi-4, Mistral, and Qwen of
different sizes from 1.5B to 72B and 14 topics. While MASJ performs similarly
to a random error predictor, the response entropy predicts model error in
knowledge-dependent domains and serves as an effective indicator of question
difficulty: for biology ROC AUC is 0.73. This correlation vanishes for the
reasoning-dependent domain: for math questions ROC-AUC is 0.55. More
principally, we found out that the entropy measure required a reasoning amount.
Thus, data-uncertainty related entropy should be integrated within uncertainty
estimates frameworks, while MASJ requires refinement. Moreover, existing
MMLU-Pro samples are biased, and should balance required amount of reasoning
for different subdomains to provide a more fair assessment of LLMs performance.