It is suggested that models possess relevant subpopulation knowledge but do not reliably propagate it into aggregate estimates, and this gap establishes statistical self-consistency as an unsaturated, reference-free criterion for evaluating LLMs.
Abstract
In-context learning is commonly interpreted as a form of conditional inference, in which the prompt specifies a context and the model's output is treated as an estimate of the corresponding conditional distribution. If this interpretation holds, then LLM estimates should satisfy basic probabilistic identities. In particular, the law of total probability asserts that prior-weighted conditional distributions aggregate into population-level marginals over any valid partition of the population. In this work, we investigate to what extent LLM estimates adhere to this self-consistency principle. We use binary trees as an evaluation scaffold to recursively partition a population into increasingly fine-grained subpopulations. We then prompt LLMs with verbalized subpopulation descriptions in context, aggregate the resulting estimates back into population-level estimates, and compare them across partitions of varying granularity. Applying this protocol across problem domains and state-of-the-art frontier models, we show widespread violations of basic consistency properties. An in-depth study of persona prompting reveals a pattern we call the macro fallacy: estimates reconstructed from more fine-grained subpopulation responses are often better aligned with human reference data than direct population-level estimates. This effect persists across variations in tree structure and estimation task, and can be partially recovered through implicit prompting. Together, these findings suggest that models possess relevant subpopulation knowledge but do not reliably propagate it into aggregate estimates. This gap establishes statistical self-consistency as an unsaturated, reference-free criterion for evaluating LLMs.
It is shown that when resampling many reasoning chains, uncertainty dynamics converge to stable patterns, and noise is largely an artifact of sampling rather than an LLM's sensitivity to each individual token or reasoning step.
Eric J. Bigelow, Amir Zur, Satchel Grant et al.· 1 citation
As generative artificial intelligence enters scientific and professional work, its uncertainty must be defined on the states that matter for inference and decision-making. Language models assign probabilities to words, whereas applications require uncertainty over meaningful states such as diagnoses, hypotheses or operational conditions. We introduce a \emph{semantic map}: a prespecified, testable bridge from probabilities over verbal responses to a posterior over declared finite states. The language distribution remains unrestricted; held-out calibration connects it to a reference posterior. We derive posterior-error bounds and conditions for existence, conditional uniqueness, presentation stability and stable inverse recovery. This distinction matters because language probabilities depend on prompt wording, while the target posterior should not change under information-equivalent rewording. Experiments use professional market text compiled from Federal Reserve economic and financial series, together with controlled simulations having exact posteriors. Across two fitted language models, language-derived probabilities outperform printed numerical confidence, recover held-out posteriors with valid uncertainty coverage, remain largely stable under paraphrase and respond appropriately to altered evidence. \textbf{Prompt engineering optimises a wording-dependent response; robust scientific use requires validated stability of application-relevant meaning.} The proposed map turns semantic uncertainty in generative systems into an identifiable and testable statistical measurement problem and, when its acceptance conditions hold, yields an auditable posterior estimate.
It is proposed that a model's uncertainty about a token is reflected not only in the breadth of its output distribution but also in whether a confident prediction is \emph{fragile} under perturbation of its attention pathways, a training-free estimator that masks attention heads and measures the BALD mutual information among the resulting subnetworks.
Minsoo Kim, Sungyoung Ji, Kisung Moon et al.· 0 citations
A crossed random-effects (generalizability-theory) decomposition is specified that partitions the total variance of a response-level brand outcome into these four sources, and embeds the components in a decision-study allocation that returns how many repeats, paraphrases, models, and languages to buy for a target reliability.
For applications that require per-persona outputs, the same model that cannot sample from a distribution can describe it accurately in a single call, and is proposed Prompt-Perturbed Argyle (PPA), which reduces the same error by 21% at no added cost.
Confidence estimation for large language models (LLMs) aims to estimate the probability that a generated answer is correct, while calibration aligns these estimates with empirical accuracy. Prior work has shown that token probabilities are often overconfident, we investigate whether these readily available signals can nevertheless provide well-calibrated confidence estimation for mathematical question answering. We compare single-pass estimators, which reuse token probabilities from the original generation, with multi-pass estimators, which obtain additional confidence signals through verification or stochastic forward passes. While individual token probabilities can be highly saturated, we find that aggregating token probabilities over the full sequence captures small but consistent differences between correct and incorrect generations, yielding more informative confidence estimates. Multi-pass methods can yield calibrated confidence estimates. We study two such approaches: self-verification through re-prompting, including a lower-cost in-situ variant, and Monte Carlo Dropout, which derives confidence from variation across stochastic forward passes. We further evaluate two post-hoc calibration methods, Platt scaling and isotonic regression, both of which substantially reduce in-domain calibration error. However, their data efficiency varies with dataset difficulty, and the calibration mappings often transfer asymmetrically across datasets and models.
A. Ma, Lorne Schell, Vin Bhaskara et al.· 0 citations
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