A Survey of Uncertainty Estimation Methods on Large Language Models
Zhiqiu Xia, Jinxuan Xu, Yuqian Zhang, Hang Liu
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, these models could offer biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses camouflaged by their fluency and realistic appearance. Uncertainty estimation is the key method to address this challenge. While research efforts in uncertainty estimation are ramping up, there is a lack of comprehensive and dedicated surveys on LLM uncertainty estimation. This survey presents four major avenues of LLM uncertainty estimation. Furthermore, we perform extensive experimental evaluations across multiple methods and datasets. At last, we provide critical and promising future directions for LLM uncertainty estimation.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{xia-etal-2025-survey,
title = "A Survey of Uncertainty Estimation Methods on Large Language Models",
author = "Xia, Zhiqiu and
Xu, Jinxuan and
Zhang, Yuqian and
Liu, Hang",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.1101/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1101",
pages = "21381--21396",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}