Uncertainty Estimation: Charting the Path to Trustworthy AI Across Domains

Latest 50 papers on uncertainty estimation: Nov. 23, 2025

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI/ML, the ability of models to not just make predictions but also to understand and communicate their own confidence – or lack thereof – is becoming paramount. This isn’t merely an academic pursuit; it’s a critical requirement for deploying AI in high-stakes environments, from healthcare and autonomous systems to financial markets and cybersecurity. The challenge lies in accurately quantifying different types of uncertainty (aleatoric, epistemic, and intrinsic) and integrating these insights into decision-making processes. Fortunately, recent research heralds a wave of innovative breakthroughs, pushing the boundaries of trustworthy AI. Let’s delve into some of these exciting advancements.### The Big Idea(s) & Core Innovationsoverarching theme in recent uncertainty estimation research is a move towards more granular, context-aware, and computationally efficient methods. Researchers are tackling the inherent stochasticity and complexity of real-world data head-on, often by rethinking traditional approaches.instance, the challenge of predicting complex, irregularly sampled clinical data, which inherently carries significant uncertainty, is addressed by Muhammad Aslanimoghanloo et al. from Radboud University in their paper, “Generative Modeling of Clinical Time Series via Latent Stochastic Differential Equations“. They propose a novel generative framework using latent neural Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs), providing a flexible and unified way to model stochasticity and outperform traditional methods like ODEs and LSTMs. This is a game-changer for personalized medicine, offering more reliable predictions.the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), a significant focus is on mitigating hallucinations and improving reliability. Moses Kiprono from Catholic University of America, in “Mathematical Analysis of Hallucination Dynamics in Large Language Models: Uncertainty Quantification, Advanced Decoding, and Principled Mitigation“, offers a mathematically rigorous framework, introducing novel uncertainty metrics that incorporate semantic similarity and positional phase. This allows for a nuanced understanding of model confidence, coupled with principled mitigation strategies like contrastive decoding.this, Manh Nguyen et al. from Deakin University, in “Probabilities Are All You Need: A Probability-Only Approach to Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models“, propose a remarkably simple, training-free method relying solely on top-K probabilities from sampled generations. This significantly reduces computational overhead while proving superior in question-answering tasks. Similarly, Ji Won Park and Kyunghyun Cho from Prescient Design, Genentech, and NYU in “Efficient semantic uncertainty quantification in language models via diversity-steered sampling“, introduce diversity-steered sampling to reduce redundant outputs and efficiently estimate semantic (aleatoric) and epistemic uncertainties, applicable to both autoregressive and masked diffusion models.the practical control of LLMs, Ege Beyazit et al. from Amazon in “Enabling Fine-Grained Operating Points for Black-Box LLMs” tackle the issue of low-cardinality numerical outputs from black-box LLMs. They offer solutions that increase operational granularity for critical decision-making without sacrificing performance.LLMs, uncertainty quantification is transforming specialized domains. In computational pathology, Xiangde Luo et al. from Stanford University introduce “nnMIL: A generalizable multiple instance learning framework for computational pathology“. nnMIL provides principled uncertainty estimation, enhancing clinical utility by identifying low-confidence cases for further review. For autonomous systems, lrx02’s “Monocular 3D Lane Detection via Structure Uncertainty-Aware Network with Curve-Point Queries” improves robustness by modeling spatial variations in lane geometry, critical for self-driving cars. In robotics, Shiyuan Yin et al. from Henan University of Technology and China Telecom’s “Towards Reliable LLM-based Robot Planning via Combined Uncertainty Estimation” introduces CURE, a framework that distinguishes epistemic from intrinsic uncertainty to improve the reliability and safety of LLM-based robot planning., for deep ensembles, Kaizheng Wang et al. from KU Leuven and Oxford Brookes University present “Credal Ensemble Distillation for Uncertainty Quantification” (CRED). This novel framework compresses deep ensembles into a single model, using probability intervals (credal sets) to capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, significantly reducing inference overhead while maintaining strong performance.### Under the Hood: Models, Datasets, & Benchmarksinnovations are often underpinned by specialized models, datasets, and rigorous benchmarks:Generative SDEs for Time Series: The work by Muhammad Aslanimoghanloo et al. utilizes novel neural SDEs, demonstrating superior performance on simulated and real-world ICU data, highlighting the need for models that natively handle irregular sampling and complex interactions.LLM Hallucination & Confidence: Moses Kiprono’s framework for LLM hallucination builds on probabilistic modeling and information theory, proposing new semantic and phase-aware uncertainty metrics. Manh Nguyen et al. use top-K probabilities from standard LLM generations, showing its efficacy across various question-answering tasks. Bayesian-MoE from Maryam Dialameh et al. at the University of Waterloo and Huawei enhances post-hoc uncertainty estimation for Qwen1.5-MoE and DeepSeek-MoE on common-sense reasoning benchmarks. Ege Beyazit et al.’s work on black-box LLMs implicitly uses various LLMs (e.g., from AWS Bedrock, Anthropic) and focuses on their verbalized confidence scores to improve fine-grained operating points. Kevin Wang et al. from the University of Texas at Dallas provide an extensive empirical evaluation of twelve uncertainty estimation methods on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution QA tasks, using metrics like LLMScore, Rouge-L, and BERTScore.Pathology & Medical Imaging: nnMIL (Code) by Xiangde Luo et al. is a generalizable framework for computational pathology, evaluated on various clinical tasks like disease diagnosis and prognosis. Roman Kinakha et al. from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid introduce nnUNet-B, a Bayesian segmentation framework for PD-L1 expression from H&E-stained histology images using Multimodal Posterior Sampling. Wenxiang Chen et al.’s work on ultrasound image segmentation leverages Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) with their uncertainty-aware refinement mechanism on the DDTI dataset. The CURVAS challenge (Code) provides a new benchmark for multi-organ segmentation under multi-rater variability using abdominal CT scans.Robotics & Autonomous Systems: lrx02’s monocular 3D lane detection work introduces curve-point queries and new bidirectional Chamfer distances for evaluation on ONCE-3DLanes. EvidMTL from Zhang, Wang, and Chen leverages an evidential loss function in a multi-task learning framework for semantic surface mapping from monocular RGB images. Nickisch et al.’s (assumed University of Tübingen affiliation) work on safe robot navigation uses Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces (GPIS) as control barrier functions, validated with platforms like Bitcraze Crazyflie.Optimization & Time Series: Yukun Du et al. from National University of Defense Technology in “Meta-Black-Box Optimization with Bi-Space Landscape Analysis and Dual-Control Mechanism for SAEA” incorporate TabPFN as an efficient surrogate model. Jieting Wang et al. from Shanxi University introduce OCE-TS, replacing Mean Squared Error (MSE) with Ordinal Cross-Entropy for time series forecasting. Huanbo Lyu et al. from the University of Birmingham (Code) propose a dual-ranking strategy for multi-objective optimization, enhancing NSGA-II with uncertainty. Giorgio Palma et al. from the National Research Council-Institute of Marine Engineering introduce an ensemble-based Hankel Dynamic Mode Decomposition with control (HDMDc), validated with experimental data and CFD simulations of the Delft 372 catamaran.Graph Data & Novel Applications: Fred Xu and Thomas Markovich from Block Inc. and UCLA use Stochastic Partial Differential Equations (SPDEs) and Matérn Gaussian Processes for uncertainty on graphs. Shu Hong et al. from George Washington University and Amazon develop a framework for Bayesian optimization on graph-structured data using low-rank spectral representations, empirically validated on diverse synthetic and real-world datasets like Facebook ego-nets.### Impact & The Road Aheadcollective impact of this research is profound, ushering in an era of more reliable, transparent, and actionable AI. From enhancing the safety of autonomous vehicles and robot assistants to providing critical confidence scores for medical diagnoses and financial predictions, these advancements empower practitioners to deploy AI systems with a greater understanding of their limitations. The ability to quantify uncertainty at granular levels—be it pixel-wise in medical images, node-level in SQL queries, or semantically in LLM generations—moves us beyond opaque “black box” models. This shift fosters trust, enables targeted human-in-the-loop interventions, and opens avenues for more robust and adaptive AI.ahead, the next steps involve further integrating these uncertainty estimates into real-time decision-making, exploring new theoretical foundations for uncertainty in novel AI architectures (like diffusion models for molecular design, as explored by Lianghong Chen et al. from Western University), and building more robust systems that can proactively adapt to unexpected or out-of-distribution data. The focus will remain on developing frameworks that are not only accurate but also interpretable and ethically sound, ensuring that as AI becomes more powerful, it also becomes more accountable. The journey towards truly trustworthy AI, guided by robust uncertainty estimation, is an exhilarating one, promising safer and more intelligent applications across every facet of our lives.