Benchmarking Large Language Model Uncertainty for Prompt Optimization

View a PDF of the paper titled Benchmarking Large Language Model Uncertainty for Prompt Optimization, by Pei-Fu Guo and 2 other authors

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Abstract:Prompt optimization algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in multi-step reasoning but still lack effective uncertainty estimation. This paper introduces a benchmark dataset to evaluate uncertainty metrics, focusing on Answer, Correctness, Aleatoric, and Epistemic Uncertainty. Through analysis of models like GPT-3.5-Turbo and Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, we show that current metrics align more with Answer Uncertainty, which reflects output confidence and diversity, rather than Correctness Uncertainty, highlighting the need for improved metrics that are optimization-objective-aware to better guide prompt optimization. Our code and dataset are available at this https URL.