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. Certifying Whether to Adapt: Baseline-Relative PAC-Bayes-MMD Guarantees for Test-Time Adaptation

    May 20, 2026Ahanaf Hasan Ariq, Hasaan Ahmad, Aayush Parekh +1Distribution Shift RobustnessPAC-Bayesian Generalization Bounds

    Ideal School and College

  2. Descriptive versus Regulatory Uncertainty in Bounded Predictive Systems

    May 17, 2026Ahmed Gamal EldinLLM Uncertainty EstimationEpistemic Uncertainty

    Nova University Lisbon – Cairo Branch (NOVA IMS), Cairo, Egypt

  3. Semantic Reward Collapse and the Preservation of Epistemic Integrity in Adaptive AI Systems

    May 12, 2026William ParrisReward ModelingReward Hacking

    BDB Labs / BagelTech · San Diego, California, USA

  4. Random-Set Graph Neural Networks

    May 12, 2026Tommy Woodley, Shireen Kudukkil Manchingal, Matteo Tolloso +2Graph Neural NetworksUncertainty Quantification

    School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Oxford Brookes University · Department of Computer Science University of Pisa · Oxford Brookes Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Data Analysis and Systems (AIDAS)

  5. The Minimax Rate of Perturbed Second-Order Calibration

    May 8, 2026Kamil Ciosek, Banafsheh Rafiee, Sina Ghiassian +1Post-Hoc CalibrationMinimax Estimation

    Spotify

  6. GEM-FI: Gated Evidential Mixtures with Fisher Modulation

    May 5, 2026Marco Mustafa Mohammed, Fatemeh Daneshfar, Pietro LiòEvidential Deep LearningOOD Detection

    Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

  7. Possibilistic Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Learning

    May 1, 2026Yao Ni, Jeremie Houssineau, Yew-Soon Ong +1Uncertainty QuantificationEpistemic Uncertainty

    Nanyang Technological University · A*STAR · The University of New South Wales +1

  8. Task-Conditioned Uncertainty Costmaps for Legged Locomotion

    Apr 30, 2026Kartikeya Singh, Christo Aluckal, Romeo Orsolino +1Robot LocomotionEpistemic Uncertainty

    DRONES Lab, University at Buffalo, NY, USA · Ocado Technology, UK

  9. Uncertainty-Aware Pedestrian Attribute Recognition via Evidential Deep Learning

    Apr 29, 2026Zhuofan Lou, Shihang Zhang, Fangle Zhu +2Evidential Deep LearningEpistemic Uncertainty

    College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Sichuan University, China

  10. Biased Dreams: Limitations to Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification in Latent Space Models

    Apr 28, 2026Julia Berger, Bernd Frauenknecht, Sebastian Trimpe +1Uncertainty QuantificationLatent Dynamics Modeling

    1RWTH Aachen University

  11. Credal Concept Bottleneck Models for Epistemic-Aleatoric Uncertainty Decomposition

    Apr 27, 2026Tanmoy Mukherjee, Thomas Bailleux, Pierre Marquis +1Uncertainty QuantificationConcept Bottleneck Models

    Univ. Artois, CNRS, CRIL, France · Institut Universitaire de France

  12. Complementing Self-Consistency with Cross-Model Disagreement for Uncertainty Quantification

    Apr 18, 2026Kimia Hamidieh, Veronika Thost, Walter Gerych +2Selective PredictionConfidence Estimation in Language Models

    1MIT · MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab · 3WPI +1

  13. EviDep: Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Depression Estimation via Disentangled Evidential Learning

    Apr 17, 2026Fangyuan Liu, Sirui Zhao, Yangsong Zhang +5Disentangled Representation LearningEvidential Deep Learning

    School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · aSchool of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · bSchool of Computer Science and Technology, Laboratory for Brain Science and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, China +1

  14. A Bayesian Perspective on the Role of Epistemic Uncertainty for Delayed Generalization in In-Context Learning

    Apr 14, 2026Abdessamed Qchohi, Simone RossiIn-Context LearningGrokking

    EURECOM, France

  15. Retrieval Is Not Enough: Why Organizational AI Needs Epistemic Infrastructure

    Apr 13, 2026Federico Bottino, Carlo Ferrero, Nicholas Dosio +1Knowledge RepresentationEpistemic Uncertainty

    Kakashi Ventures Accelerator (KVA) · Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  16. Epistemic Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 8, 2026Abhilash Reddy Chenreddy, Erick DelageUncertainty Estimation in RLOffline RL

    GERAD, Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal, Montréal, Québec H3T 2A7, Canada

  17. Uncertainty-Aware Foundation Models for Clinical Data

    Apr 5, 2026Qian Zhou, Yuanyun Zhang, Shi LiEpistemic UncertaintyMultimodal Foundation Models

    University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences · Columbia University

  18. Variational LSTM with Augmented Inputs: Nonlinear Response History Metamodeling with Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty

    Apr 2, 2026Manisha Sapkota, Min Li, Bowei LiSurrogate ModelingUncertainty Propagation

    Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, Texas Tech University, 2500 Broadway St, Lubbock 79409, TX, USA · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy 12180, NY, USA · National Wind Institute, Texas Tech University, 1009 Canton Ave, Lubbock 79409, TX, USA

  19. Procela: Epistemic Governance in Mechanistic Simulations Under Structural Uncertainty

    Apr 1, 2026Kinson VernetEpistemic UncertaintyUncertainty Quantification

    Independent Researcher

  20. Uncertainty Gating for Cost-Aware Explainable Artificial Intelligence

    Mar 31, 2026Georgii Mikriukov, Grégoire Montavon, Marina M. -C. HöhneExplainable Artificial IntelligenceExplainability Evaluation

    Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy (ATB), Potsdam, Germany · BIFOLD – Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, Berlin, Germany · Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany +1

  21. An Isotropic Approach to Efficient Uncertainty Quantification with Gradient Norms

    Mar 31, 2026Nils Grünefeld, Jes Frellsen, Christian HardmeierUncertainty QuantificationLLM Uncertainty Estimation

    1IT University of Copenhagen · 3Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence · 2Technical University of Denmark

  22. Entropic Claim Resolution: Uncertainty-Driven Evidence Selection for RAG

    Mar 30, 2026Davide Di GioiaRetrieval-Augmented GenerationEvidence Selection

  23. Quantification of Credal Uncertainty: A Distance-Based Approach

    Mar 28, 2026Xabier Gonzalez-Garcia, Siu Lun Chau, Julian Rodemann +6Uncertainty QuantificationAleatoric Uncertainty

    Dept. of Statistics, CS & Mathematics, Public Univ. of Navarre · EPIC Lab, Nanyang Technological Univ. Singapore · Rational Intelligence Lab, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security +7

  24. The Anatomy of Uncertainty in LLMs

    Mar 26, 2026Aditya Taparia, Ransalu Senanayake, Kowshik Thopalli +1LLM AuditingLLM Reliability

    School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University · Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  25. Rethinking Uncertainty Quantification and Entanglement in Image Segmentation

    Mar 19, 2026Jakob Lønborg Christensen, Vedrana Andersen Dahl, Morten Rieger Hannemose +2Uncertainty QuantificationDeep Ensembles

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

  26. FoMo X: Modular Explainability Signals for Outlier Detection Foundation Models

    Mar 18, 2026Simon Klüttermann, Tim Katzke, Phuong Huong Nguyen +1Interpretable Anomaly DetectionUnsupervised Anomaly Detection

    TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany · Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security, University Alliance Ruhr, Dortmund, Germany

  27. The Geometry of Knowing: From Possibilistic Ignorance to Probabilistic Certainty -- A Measure-Theoretic Framework for Epistemic Convergence

    Mar 13, 2026Moriba Kemessia JahImprecise ProbabilityEpistemic Uncertainty

    Black Swan Research Group, GaiaVerse, Ltd., Austin, TX 78728, USA · Jah Decision Intelligence Group, Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712

  28. CUPID: A Plug-in Framework for Joint Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty Estimation with a Single Model

    Mar 11, 2026Xinran Xu, Xiuyi FanUncertainty QuantificationEpistemic Uncertainty

    Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Centre for Medical Technologies & Innovations, National Health Group, Singapore

  29. Verbalizing LLM's Higher-order Uncertainty via Imprecise Probabilities

    Mar 11, 2026Anita Yang, Krikamol Muandet, Michele Caprio +2Imprecise ProbabilityLLM Uncertainty Estimation

    Lattice Lab, Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan · Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo, Japan · Rational Intelligence Lab, CISPA, Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany +3

  30. From Scalars to Tensors: Declared Losses Recover Epistemic Distinctions That Neutrosophic Scalars Cannot Express

    Mar 10, 2026Tony MasonEpistemic UncertaintyLLM Evaluation

    University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada · Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA