Epistemic Uncertainty

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Overview

Epistemic uncertainty concerns what a model does not know, often distinguished from aleatoric uncertainty caused by inherent variability or ambiguity in observations. Researchers estimate it with Bayesian methods, ensembles and dropout, evidential models, and set-valued or credal predictions, then use it for out-of-distribution detection, selective prediction, active learning, and safer decisions. Work increasingly evaluates whether uncertainty is calibrated and useful for specific decisions, including through conformal guarantees, abstention tests, and benchmarks under distribution shift. A central tension is that common signals such as ensemble disagreement or predictive entropy may not reliably track missing knowledge, and their value depends on how uncertainty is defined and tested.

Latest papers

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113 papers14 papers in the last four weeks, up 250% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Conditional Flow Models Convert Epistemic Uncertainty into Apparent Aleatoric Variance

    Oct 21, 2026Navodita Sharma, Abhishek Shetty, Max Simchowitz +1Conditional Flow MatchingConditional Distribution Estimation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Georgia Institute of Technology · Carnegie Mellon University

  2. Neural Networks with Differentiable Belief-Function Layers

    Oct 18, 2026Antonin SulcEvidential Deep LearningEpistemic Uncertainty

  3. What "Form'' of Uncertainty Does Conformal Prediction Quantify?

    Oct 17, 2026Soroush H. Zargarbashi, Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Rebekka Burkholz +1Conformal PredictionEpistemic Uncertainty

    CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security · University of Cologne

  4. Trust Before Autonomy: Rethinking Agentic Remote Sensing for Crisis Response

    Oct 13, 2026Georgios Angelidis, Aggelos Psiris, Spyridon Evangelatos +4Agent ReliabilityRemote Sensing

    Harokopio University of Athens, Athens, Greece · Netcompany-Intrasoft S.A., Luxembourg, Luxembourg · Dimocritus University of Thrace, Kavala, Greece +1

  5. Vision: "What Don't I Know About User's Preferences?" How Uncertainty Estimation Improves Proactive Assistant Alignment

    Oct 11, 2026Zhiyu An, Ziyi Xuan, Yu Yang +1Proactive AgentsUser Preference Modeling

    University of California, Merced Merced, California, USA · Lehigh University Bethlehem, Pennsylvania USA

  6. Accurate but Not Humble: Evaluating Epistemic Humility in LLM Agents under Knowledge Conflict

    Oct 8, 2026Kaiser Sun, Bernal Jimenez Gutierrez, Hongjun Liu +4LLM Agent EvaluationEpistemic Uncertainty

    Johns Hopkins University · New York University

  7. Addressing Overcommitment in the Reasoning of Gendered Economic Memes under Multimodal Ambiguity

    Oct 8, 2026Kushal Kanwar, Dushyant Singh Chauhan, Kapil Rana +2Multimodal UnderstandingEpistemic Uncertainty

    Jaypee University of Information Technology · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology +1

  8. Epistemic Uncertainty-Aware Defect Detection for Quality Control in Medical Device Manufacturing

    Oct 6, 2026Raham A. Butt, Marco Romanelli, Roche C. de GuzmanSelective PredictionEpistemic Uncertainty

    Department of Engineering, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549 USA · Department of Computer Science, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549 USA

  9. Evaluation of Active Feature Acquisition Policies with Tabular Foundation Models

    Oct 5, 2026Yuta Kobayashi, Divyam Madaan, Shalmali JoshiOff-Policy EvaluationValue Function Estimation

    Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

  10. Rethinking Epistemic Uncertainty in Node Classification through Information Growth

    Oct 2, 2026Emma Meneghini, Francesco Ferrini, Bruno Lepri +2Epistemic UncertaintyEvidential Deep Learning

    University of Trento · Fondazione Bruno Kessler, FBK · University of Tromsø

  11. Revealing Epistemic Uncertainty in MLLMs via Causal-Invariant Masking

    Oct 2, 2026Haoyang Luo, Linwei Tao, Jie Gui +4LLM Uncertainty EstimationEpistemic Uncertainty

    Computer Science City University of Hong Kong · Machine Learning Research Apple · Cyber Science and Engineering Southeast University +2

  12. Beyond Answer Confidence: A Controlled Audit of Self-Knowledge in a Black-Box Decision Model

    Oct 1, 2026Sharath M Shankaranarayana, Davor Runje, Jan JanninkProbability CalibrationBlack-Box Model Auditing

  13. Structural Limits of the Information-Theoretic Uncertainty Decomposition

    Sep 30, 2026Jakob Lønborg Christensen, Christian F. Baumgartner, Morten Rieger Hannemose +2Aleatoric UncertaintyInformation-Theoretic Lower Bounds

    DTU Compute Technical University of Denmark · Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine University of Lucerne

  14. Epistemic Learning from Imprecise Annotation

    Sep 28, 2026Kaizheng Wang, Siu Lun ChauSoft-Label LearningEpistemic Uncertainty

    Epistemic Intelligence & Computation Lab, College of Computing & Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  15. Moral Entropy: Auditing Bias and Uncertainty in Moral Judgment

    Sep 18, 2026Maciej SkorskiAnnotator DisagreementAlgorithmic Auditing

    University of Luxembourg

  16. Adaptive Rollout Truncation Based on Epistemic Uncertainty for Efficient Offline World Model Training

    Sep 18, 2026Nikodem Sebastian Zymla, Laurin Thiele, Johannes PitzWorld Model LearningWorld Models for Robotics

    TUM School of CIT Technical University of Munich · AIDX Lab Technical University of Munich

  17. Decomposing LLM-Judge Uncertainty to Target Expert Labels

    Sep 6, 2026Ryan LailAnnotator DisagreementLLM-as-a-Judge

    Composo AI

  18. Uncertainty-Aware End-to-End AI Weather Forecasting: Disentangling Observation and Model Contributions

    Aug 31, 2026Rodrigo Almeida, Noelia Otero, Jost Arndt +3Probabilistic ForecastingAleatoric Uncertainty

    Applied Machine Learning Group, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute, 10587 Berlin, Germany · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin, 10587 Berlin, Germany · BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, 10587 Berlin, Germany

  19. Beyond Local Surprise: Grounded Dialogue as Selective Belief Revision under Referential Uncertainty

    Aug 26, 2026Ziming Liu, Bhanu Chaitanya Jasti, Ziyang Xu +3Belief RevisionMulti-Turn Dialogue Evaluation

    School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma · School of Library and Information Studies, University of Oklahoma · School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

  20. SPARC: Single-Pass Scaling for Motion Forecasting with Conformal Bayesian Last Layers

    Aug 21, 2026Sakif Hossain, Julian Teusch, Jörg P. MüllerHuman Motion PredictionUncertainty Calibration

    Clausthal University of Technology (TU Clausthal)

  21. Robust Risk Under Evolving Uncertainty: A Wasserstein Counterpart of the Entropic Value-at-Risk

    Aug 19, 2026Deep Kumar Ganguly, Jan KřetínskýRisk-Sensitive RLWasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization

    Technical University of Munich, Germany · Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

  22. LLMs Don't Pay for the Jump

    Aug 14, 2026Paras Balani, Subhrakanta PandaAbductive Reasoning in Language ModelsAbductive Reasoning

    Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, Jawahar Nagar, Kapra Mandal, Medchal District, Telangana 500078, India · Department of Computer Science, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, Jawahar Nagar, Kapra Mandal, Medchal District, Telangana 500078, India

  23. TRAPSBench: Vision-Language Models Encode but Fail to Express Epistemic Restraint

    Aug 13, 2026Fnu Pramono, John Cai, Sourabh KulkarniVLM EvaluationAbstention in VLMs

    Meta Superintelligence Labs · Reflection AI

  24. Tracing sources of epistemic uncertainty in deep learning predictions: homo- and hetero-scedastic linearized estimators

    Aug 7, 2026Pierre Nodet, Thomas GeorgeUncertainty QuantificationAleatoric Uncertainty

    Orange Research, Châtillon, France

  25. Explicit, Not Longer: What Makes Epistemic Stance Survive Memory Compression

    Aug 7, 2026Alex KwonLLM Agent MemoryMemory Compression

    Independent Researcher

  26. A Ground-Truth Framework for Uncertainty Disentanglement with Posterior Risk

    Aug 6, 2026Frieder Wizgall, Georg Tirpitz, Moritz Seiler +2Uncertainty QuantificationAleatoric Uncertainty

    University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany · Hertie Institute for AI in Brain Health, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany · Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Berlin, Germany +2

  27. Bayesian Expected Uncertainty Reduction (B-EUR) Model: A Computational Account of What Makes Design Options Worth Trying

    Aug 6, 2026Shimon Honda, Takuma Miyaguchi, Koji Koizumi +3Computational Cognitive ModelingValue of Information

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan · Laboratoire Conception de Produits et Innovation (LCPI), Arts et M´etiers ParisTech, 151 Boulevard de l’Hˆopital, 75013 Paris, France

  28. Intention Inference Under Execution Noise: Separating Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Social Dilemmas

    Aug 3, 2026Kival Mahadew, Jonathan ShockSocial DilemmasPartially Observable Markov Decision Processes

    Dept. of Computer Science, University of Cape Town · Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town · Dept. of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town +2

  29. Belief-Guided Decision Making with Uncertainty Gating in the Game of Go

    Jul 29, 2026Mehrad Yaghoubi, Azam Bastanfard, Abbas Jalilvand +1Game-Playing AgentsDecision-Making under Uncertainty

    Department of Computer Engineering, Ka.C, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran

  30. ELECTRIC: Evidential Learning-Enhanced CT Reconstruction via Iterative Correction

    Jul 27, 2026Ge WangEvidential Deep LearningBayesian Inverse Problems

    Department of Biomedical Engineering Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department of Computer Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA