Uncertainty Quantification

Also known as UQ

Overview

Uncertainty quantification studies what is unknown in a prediction or inference, where that uncertainty comes from, and how it should affect decisions. Common approaches include Bayesian methods, ensembles and Gaussian processes, which model predictive distributions; conformal prediction, which provides distribution-free coverage guarantees; and calibration methods that adjust confidence or intervals against observed errors. Researchers apply these tools to settings from medical imaging and physical simulations to language models, evaluating calibration, coverage, error detection and performance under distribution shift. A central challenge is that well-calibrated or narrow estimates do not always identify actual failures, so methods must be tested in the conditions and for the decisions where they will be used, while balancing reliability against computational cost.

Latest papers

663 papers58 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Apr 4, 2026

Evaluation of Bagging Predictors with Kernel Density Estimation and Bagging Score

For a larger set of predictions of several differently trained machine learning models, known as bagging predictors, the mean of all predictions is taken by default. Nevertheless, this proceeding can deviate from the actual ground truth in certain parameter regions. An approach is presented to determine a representative y_BS from such a set of predictions using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) in nonlinear regression with Neural Networks (NN) which simultaneously provides an associated quality criterion beta_BS, called Bagging Score (BS), that reflects the confidence of the obtained ensemble prediction. It is shown that working with the new approach better predictions can be made than working with the common use of mean or median. In addition to this, the used method is contrasted to several approaches of nonlinear regression from the literatur, resulting in a top ranking in each of the calculated error values without using any optimization or feature selection technique.
Apr 3, 2026

Evolutionary Search for Automated Design of Uncertainty Quantification Methods

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for large language models are predominantly designed by hand based on domain knowledge and heuristics, limiting their scalability and generality. We apply LLM-powered evolutionary search to automatically discover unsupervised UQ methods represented as Python programs. On the task of atomic claim verification, our evolved methods outperform strong manually-designed baselines, achieving up to 6.7% relative ROC-AUC improvement across 9 datasets while generalizing robustly out-of-distribution. Qualitative analysis reveals that different LLMs employ qualitatively distinct evolutionary strategies: Claude models consistently design high-feature-count linear estimators, while Gpt-oss-120B gravitates toward simpler and more interpretable positional weighting schemes. Surprisingly, only Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5 reliably leverage increased method complexity to improve performance -- Opus 4.6 shows an unexpected regression relative to its predecessor. Overall, our results indicate that LLM-powered evolutionary search is a promising paradigm for automated, interpretable hallucination detector design.
Apr 3, 2026

Geometrically-Constrained Radar-Inertial Odometry via Continuous Point-Pose Uncertainty Modeling

Radar odometry is crucial for robust localization in challenging environments; however, the sparsity of reliable returns and distinctive noise characteristics impede its performance. This paper introduces geometrically-constrained radar-inertial odometry and mapping that jointly consolidates point and pose uncertainty. We employ the continuous trajectory model to estimate the pose uncertainty at any arbitrary timestamp by propagating uncertainties of the control points. These pose uncertainties are continuously integrated with heteroscedastic measurement uncertainty during point projection, thereby enabling dynamic evaluation of observation confidence and adaptive down-weighting of uninformative radar points. By leveraging quantified uncertainties in radar mapping, we construct a high-fidelity map that improves odometry accuracy under imprecise radar measurements. Moreover, we reveal the effectiveness of explicit geometrical constraints in radar-inertial odometry when incorporated with the proposed uncertainty-aware mapping framework. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, yielding substantial performance improvements in both accuracy and efficiency compared to existing baselines. We release our open-source implementation at https://github.com/wooseongY/GeoRIO.
Apr 2, 2026

Enhancing the Reliability of Medical AI through Expert-guided Uncertainty Modeling

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems accelerate medical workflows and improve diagnostic accuracy in healthcare, serving as second-opinion systems. However, the unpredictability of AI errors poses a significant challenge, particularly in healthcare contexts, where mistakes can have severe consequences. A widely adopted safeguard is to pair predictions with uncertainty estimation, enabling human experts to focus on high-risk cases while streamlining routine verification. Current uncertainty estimation methods, however, remain limited, particularly in quantifying aleatoric uncertainty, which arises from data ambiguity and noise. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages disagreement in expert responses to generate targets for training machine learning models. These targets are used in conjunction with standard data labels to estimate two components of uncertainty separately, as given by the law of total variance, via a two-ensemble approach, as well as its lightweight variant. We validate our method on binary image classification, binary and multi-class image segmentation, and multiple-choice question answering. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating expert knowledge can enhance uncertainty estimation quality by 9%9\% to 50%50\% depending on the task, making this source of information invaluable for the construction of risk-aware AI systems in healthcare applications.
Apr 2, 2026

Towards Intrinsically Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification in Industrial Data-Driven Models via Diffusion Sampler

In modern process industries, data-driven models are important tools for real-time monitoring when key performance indicators are difficult to measure directly. While accurate predictions are essential, reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is equally critical for safety, reliability, and decision-making, but remains a major challenge in current data-driven approaches. In this work, we introduce a diffusion-based posterior sampling framework that inherently produces well-calibrated predictive uncertainty via faithful posterior sampling, eliminating the need for post-hoc calibration. In extensive evaluations on synthetic distributions, the Raman-based phenylacetic acid soft sensor benchmark, and a real ammonia synthesis case study, our method achieves practical improvements over existing UQ techniques in both uncertainty calibration and predictive accuracy. These results highlight diffusion samplers as a principled and scalable paradigm for advancing uncertainty-aware modeling in industrial applications.
Apr 1, 2026

UQ-SHRED: uncertainty quantification of shallow recurrent decoder networks for sparse sensing via engression

Reconstructing high-dimensional spatiotemporal fields from sparse sensor measurements is critical in a wide range of scientific applications. The SHallow REcurrent Decoder (SHRED) architecture is a recent state-of-the-art architecture that reconstructs high-quality spatial domain from hyper-sparse sensor measurement streams. An important limitation of SHRED is that in complex, data-scarce, high-frequency, or stochastic systems, portions of the spatiotemporal field must be modeled with valid uncertainty estimation. We introduce UQ-SHRED, a distributional learning framework for sparse sensing problems that provides uncertainty quantification through a neural network-based distributional regression called engression. UQ-SHRED models the uncertainty by learning the predictive distribution of the spatial state conditioned on the sensor history. By injecting stochastic noise into sensor inputs and training with an energy score loss, UQ-SHRED produces predictive distributions with minimal computational overhead, requiring only noise injection at the input and resampling through a single architecture without retraining or additional network structures. On complicated synthetic and real-life datasets including turbulent flow, atmospheric dynamics, neuroscience and astrophysics, UQ-SHRED provides a distributional approximation with well-calibrated confidence intervals. We further conduct ablation studies to understand how each model setting affects the quality of the UQ-SHRED performance, and its validity on uncertainty quantification over a set of different experimental setups.
Apr 1, 2026

Safe learning-based control via function-based uncertainty quantification

Uncertainty quantification is essential when deploying learning-based control methods in safety-critical systems. This is commonly realized by constructing uncertainty tubes that enclose the unknown function of interest, e.g., the reward and constraint functions or the underlying dynamics model, with high probability. However, existing approaches for uncertainty quantification typically rely on restrictive assumptions that encode smoothness properties of the unknown function, such as a known norm in a function space. Moreover, these methods usually struggle with discontinuities. In this paper, we model the unknown function as a random function from which independent and identically distributed realizations can be generated. We then construct uncertainty tubes via the scenario approach that hold with high probability. Our uncertainty tubes rely solely on sampled realizations and can therefore accommodate discontinuities represented by the sampling model. We integrate these uncertainty tubes into a safe Bayesian optimization algorithm with which we safely tune control parameters on a real Furuta pendulum.
Apr 1, 2026

Procela: Epistemic Governance in Mechanistic Simulations Under Structural Uncertainty

Mechanistic simulations typically assume fixed ontologies: variables, causal relationships, and resolution policies are static. This assumption fails when the true causal structure is contested or unidentifiable-as in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) spread, where contact, environmental, and selection ontologies compete. We introduce Procela, a Python framework where variables act as epistemic authorities that maintain complete hypothesis memory, mechanisms encode competing ontologies as causal units, and governance observes epistemic signals and mutates system topology at runtime. This is the first framework where simulations test their own assumptions. We instantiate Procela for AMR in a hospital network with three competing families. Governance detects coverage decay, policy fragility, and runs structural probes. Results show 20.4% error reduction and 69% cumulative regret improvement over baseline. All experiments are reproducible with full auditability. Procela establishes a new paradigm: simulations that model not only the world but their own modeling process, enabling adaptation under structural uncertainty.
Mar 31, 2026

Better than Average: Spatially-Aware Aggregation of Segmentation Uncertainty Improves Downstream Performance

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of automated image segmentations in safety-critical domains like biomedical image analysis or autonomous driving. In segmentation, UQ generates pixel-wise uncertainty scores that must be aggregated into image-level scores for downstream tasks like Out-of-Distribution (OoD) or failure detection. Despite routine use of aggregation strategies, their properties and impact on downstream task performance have not yet been comprehensively studied. Global Average is the default choice, yet it does not account for spatial and structural features of segmentation uncertainty. Alternatives like patch-, class- and threshold-based strategies exist, but lack systematic comparison, leading to inconsistent reporting and unclear best practices. We address this gap by (1) formally analyzing properties, limitations, and pitfalls of common strategies; (2) proposing novel strategies that incorporate spatial uncertainty structure and (3) benchmarking their performance on OoD and failure detection across ten datasets that vary in image geometry and structure. We find that aggregators leveraging spatial structure yield stronger performance in both downstream tasks studied. However, the performance of individual aggregators depends heavily on dataset characteristics, so we (4) propose a meta-aggregator that integrates multiple aggregators and performs robustly across datasets.
Mar 31, 2026

Learning Surrogate LPV State-Space Models with Uncertainty Quantification

The Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) framework enables the construction of surrogate models of complex nonlinear and high-dimensional systems, facilitating efficient stability and performance analysis together with controller design. Despite significant advances in data-driven LPV modelling, existing approaches do not quantify the uncertainty of the obtained LPV models. Consequently, assessing model reliability for analysis and control or detecting operation outside the training regime requires extensive validation and user expertise. This paper proposes a Bayesian approach for the joint estimation of LPV state-space models, including their scheduling map, together with characterization of the model uncertainty and confidence bounds on the predicted model response directly from input-output data. Both aleatoric uncertainty due to measurement noise and epistemic uncertainty arising from limited training data and structural bias are considered. The resulting model preserves the LPV structure required for controller synthesis while enabling computationally efficient simulation and uncertainty propagation. The approach is demonstrated on the surrogate modelling of a two-dimensional nonlinear interconnection of mass-spring-damper systems.
Mar 31, 2026

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.
Mar 31, 2026

An Isotropic Approach to Efficient Uncertainty Quantification with Gradient Norms

Existing methods for quantifying predictive uncertainty in neural networks are either computationally intractable for large language models or require access to training data that is typically unavailable. We derive a lightweight alternative through two approximations: a first-order Taylor expansion that expresses uncertainty in terms of the gradient of the prediction and the parameter covariance, and an isotropy assumption on the parameter covariance. Together, these yield epistemic uncertainty as the squared gradient norm and aleatoric uncertainty as the Bernoulli variance of the point prediction, from a single forward-backward pass through an unmodified pretrained model. We justify the isotropy assumption by showing that covariance estimates built from non-training data introduce structured distortions that isotropic covariance avoids, and that theoretical results on the spectral properties of large networks support the approximation at scale. Validation against reference Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimates on synthetic problems shows strong correspondence that improves with model size. We then use the estimates to investigate when each uncertainty type carries useful signal for predicting answer correctness in question answering with large language models, revealing a benchmark-dependent divergence: the combined estimate achieves the highest mean AUROC on TruthfulQA, where questions involve genuine conflict between plausible answers, but falls to near chance on TriviaQA's factual recall, suggesting that parameter-level uncertainty captures a fundamentally different signal than self-assessment methods.
Mar 31, 2026

Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction: A Unified Framework Harnessing Positional and Semantic Uncertainties

Trajectory prediction seeks to forecast the future motion of dynamic entities, such as vehicles and pedestrians, given a temporal horizon of historical movement data and environmental context. A central challenge in this domain is the inherent uncertainty in real-time maps, arising from two primary sources: (1) positional inaccuracies due to sensor limitations or environmental occlusions, and (2) semantic errors stemming from misinterpretations of scene context. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified framework that jointly models positional and semantic uncertainties and explicitly integrates them into the trajectory prediction pipeline. Our approach employs a dual-head architecture to independently estimate semantic and positional predictions in a dual-pass manner, deriving prediction variances as uncertainty indicators in an end-to-end fashion. These uncertainties are subsequently fused with the semantic and positional predictions to enhance the robustness of trajectory forecasts. We evaluate our uncertainty-aware framework on the nuScenes real-world driving dataset, conducting extensive experiments across four map estimation methods and two trajectory prediction baselines. Results verify that our method (1) effectively quantifies map uncertainties through both positional and semantic dimensions, and (2) consistently improves the performance of existing trajectory prediction models across multiple metrics, including minimum Average Displacement Error (minADE), minimum Final Displacement Error (minFDE), and Miss Rate (MR). Code will available at https://github.com/JT-Sun/UATP.
Mar 31, 2026

Kernel-SDF: An Open-Source Library for Real-Time Signed Distance Function Estimation using Kernel Regression

Accurate and efficient scene representation is crucial for robotic tasks such as motion planning, manipulation, and navigation. Signed distance functions (SDFs) have emerged as a powerful representation for encoding distance to obstacle boundaries, enabling efficient collision-checking and trajectory optimization. However, existing methods are limited for large-scale uncertainty-aware SDF estimation from streaming sensor data: voxel-based approaches have fixed resolution and lack uncertainty quantification, neural network methods require significant training time, and Gaussian process (GP) methods struggle with scalability, sign estimation, and uncertainty calibration. In this letter, we develop an open-source library, Kernel-SDF, using kernel regression to learn SDF with calibrated uncertainty in real-time. It combines a front-end learning a continuous occupancy field via kernel regression with a back-end that estimates accurate SDF via GP regression using samples from the front-end surface boundaries. Kernel-SDF provides accurate SDF, gradient, uncertainty, and mesh construction in real-time. Evaluations show it achieves superior accuracy over existing methods while maintaining real-time performance, making it suitable for robotics tasks requiring reliable uncertainty-aware geometry.
Mar 30, 2026

LDDMM stochastic interpolants: an application to domain uncertainty quantification in hemodynamics

We introduce a novel conditional stochastic interpolant framework for generative modeling of three-dimensional shapes. The method builds on a recent LDDMM-based registration approach to learn the conditional drift between geometries. By leveraging the resulting pull-back and push-forward operators, we extend this formulation beyond standard Cartesian grids to complex shapes and random variables defined on distinct domains. We present an application in the context of cardiovascular simulations, where aortic shapes are generated from an initial cohort of patients. The conditioning variable is a latent geometric representation defined by a set of centerline points and the radii of the corresponding inscribed spheres. This methodology facilitates both data augmentation for three-dimensional biomedical shapes, and the generation of random perturbations of controlled magnitude for a given shape. These capabilities are essential for quantifying the impact of domain uncertainties arising from medical image segmentation on the estimation of relevant biomarkers.
Mar 29, 2026

Energy Score-Guided Neural Gaussian Mixture Model for Predictive Uncertainty Quantification

Quantifying predictive uncertainty is essential for real world machine learning applications, especially in scenarios requiring reliable and interpretable predictions. Many common parametric approaches rely on neural networks to estimate distribution parameters by optimizing the negative log likelihood. However, these methods often encounter challenges like training instability and mode collapse, leading to poor estimates of the mean and variance of the target output distribution. In this work, we propose the Neural Energy Gaussian Mixture Model (NE-GMM), a novel framework that integrates Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with Energy Score (ES) to enhance predictive uncertainty quantification. NE-GMM leverages the flexibility of GMM to capture complex multimodal distributions and leverages the robustness of ES to ensure well calibrated predictions in diverse scenarios. We theoretically prove that the hybrid loss function satisfies the properties of a strictly proper scoring rule, ensuring alignment with the true data distribution, and establish generalization error bounds, demonstrating that the model's empirical performance closely aligns with its expected performance on unseen data. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets demonstrate the superiority of NE-GMM in terms of both predictive accuracy and uncertainty quantification.
Mar 29, 2026

ContraMap: Contrastive Uncertainty Mapping for Robot Environment Representation

Reliable robot perception requires not only predicting scene structure, but also identifying where predictions should be treated as unreliable due to sparse or missing observations. We present ContraMap, a contrastive continuous mapping method that augments kernel-based discriminative maps with an explicit uncertainty class trained using synthetic noise samples. This formulation treats unobserved regions as a contrastive class, enabling joint environment prediction and spatial uncertainty estimation in real time without Bayesian inference. Under a simple mixture-model view, we show that the probability assigned to the uncertainty class is a monotonic function of a distance-aware uncertainty surrogate. Experiments in 2D occupancy mapping, 3D semantic mapping, and tabletop scene reconstruction show that ContraMap preserves mapping quality, produces spatially coherent uncertainty estimates, and is substantially more efficient than Bayesian kernelmap baselines.
Mar 28, 2026

Quantification of Credal Uncertainty: A Distance-Based Approach

Credal sets, i.e., closed convex sets of probability measures, provide a natural framework to represent aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in machine learning. Yet how to quantify these two types of uncertainty for a given credal set, particularly in multiclass classification, remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a distance-based approach to quantify total, aleatoric, and epistemic uncertainty for credal sets. Concretely, we introduce a family of such measures within the framework of Integral Probability Metrics (IPMs). The resulting quantities admit clear semantic interpretations, satisfy natural theoretical desiderata, and remain computationally tractable for common choices of IPMs. We instantiate the framework with the total variation distance and obtain simple, efficient uncertainty measures for multiclass classification. In the binary case, this choice recovers established uncertainty measures, for which a principled multiclass generalization has so far been missing. Empirical results confirm practical usefulness, with favorable performance at low computational cost.
Mar 28, 2026

Bayesian-Symbolic Integration for Uncertainty-Aware Parking Prediction

Accurate parking availability prediction is critical for intelligent transportation systems, but real-world deployments often face data sparsity, noise, and unpredictable changes. Addressing these challenges requires models that are not only accurate but also uncertainty-aware. In this work, we propose a loosely coupled neuro-symbolic framework that integrates Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) with symbolic reasoning to enhance robustness in uncertain environments. BNNs quantify predictive uncertainty, while symbolic knowledge extracted via decision trees and encoded using probabilistic logic programming is leveraged in two hybrid strategies: (1) using symbolic reasoning as a fallback when BNN confidence is low, and (2) refining output classes based on symbolic constraints before reapplying the BNN. We evaluate both strategies on real-world parking data under full, sparse, and noisy conditions. Results demonstrate that both hybrid methods outperform symbolic reasoning alone, and the context-refinement strategy consistently exceeds the performance of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and BNN baselines across all prediction windows. Our findings highlight the potential of modular neuro-symbolic integration in real-world, uncertainty-prone prediction tasks.
Mar 27, 2026

Uncertainty-Aware Mapping from 3D Keypoints to Anatomical Landmarks for Markerless Biomechanics

Markerless biomechanics increasingly relies on 3D skeletal keypoints extracted from video, yet downstream biomechanical mappings typically treat these estimates as deterministic, providing no principled mechanism for frame-wise quality control. In this work, we investigate predictive uncertainty as a quantitative measure of confidence for mapping 3D pose keypoints to 3D anatomical landmarks, a critical step preceding inverse kinematics and musculoskeletal analysis. Within a temporal learning framework, we model both uncertainty arising from observation noise and uncertainty related to model limitations. Using synchronized motion capture ground truth on AMASS, we evaluate uncertainty at frame and joint level through error--uncertainty rank correlation, risk--coverage analysis, and catastrophic outlier detection. Across experiments, uncertainty estimates, particularly those associated with model uncertainty, exhibit a strong monotonic association with landmark error (Spearman ρ≈0.63ρ\approx 0.63), enabling selective retention of reliable frames (error reduced to ≈16.8\approx 16.8 mm at 10% coverage) and accurate detection of severe failures (ROC-AUC ≈0.92\approx 0.92 for errors >50>50 mm). Reliability ranking remains stable under controlled input degradation, including Gaussian noise and simulated missing joints. In contrast, uncertainty attributable to observation noise provides limited additional benefit in this setting, suggesting that dominant failures in keypoint-to-landmark mapping are driven primarily by model uncertainty. Our results establish predictive uncertainty as a practical, frame-wise tool for automatic quality control in markerless biomechanical pipelines.
Mar 27, 2026

Concerning Uncertainty -- A Systematic Survey of Uncertainty-Aware XAI

This paper surveys uncertainty-aware explainable artificial intelligence (UAXAI), examining how uncertainty is incorporated into explanatory pipelines and how such methods are evaluated. Across the literature, three recurring approaches to uncertainty quantification emerge (Bayesian, Monte Carlo, and Conformal methods), alongside distinct strategies for integrating uncertainty into explanations: assessing trustworthiness, constraining models or explanations, and explicitly communicating uncertainty. Evaluation practices remain fragmented and largely model centered, with limited attention to users and inconsistent reporting of reliability properties (e.g., calibration, coverage, explanation stability). Recent work leans towards calibration, distribution free techniques and recognizes explainer variability as a central concern. We argue that progress in UAXAI requires unified evaluation principles that link uncertainty propagation, robustness, and human decision-making, and highlight counterfactual and calibration approaches as promising avenues for aligning interpretability with reliability.
Mar 27, 2026

PAD-Hand: Physics-Aware Diffusion for Hand Motion Recovery

Significant advancements made in reconstructing hands from images have delivered accurate single-frame estimates, yet they often lack physics consistency and provide no notion of how confidently the motion satisfies physics. In this paper, we propose a novel physics-aware conditional diffusion framework that refines noisy pose sequences into physically plausible hand motion while estimating the physics variance in motion estimates. Building on a MeshCNN-Transformer backbone, we formulate Euler-Lagrange dynamics for articulated hands. Unlike prior works that enforce zero residuals, we treat the resulting dynamic residuals as virtual observables to more effectively integrate physics. Through a last-layer Laplace approximation, our method produces per-joint, per-time variances that measure physics consistency and offers interpretable variance maps indicating where physical consistency weakens. Experiments on two well-known hand datasets show consistent gains over strong image-based initializations and competitive video-based methods. Qualitative results confirm that our variance estimations are aligned with the physical plausibility of the motion in image-based estimates.
Mar 27, 2026

Constitutive parameterized deep energy method for solid mechanics problems with random material parameters

In practical structural design and solid mechanics simulations, material properties inherently exhibit random variations within bounded intervals. However, evaluating mechanical responses under continuous material uncertainty remains a persistent challenge. Traditional numerical approaches, such as the Finite Element Method (FEM), incur prohibitive computational costs as they require repeated mesh discretization and equation solving for every parametric realization. Similarly, data-driven surrogate models depend heavily on massive, high-fidelity datasets, while standard physics-informed frameworks (e.g., the Deep Energy Method) strictly demand complete retraining from scratch whenever material parameters change. To bridge this critical gap, we propose the Constitutive Parameterized Deep Energy Method (CPDEM). In this purely physics-driven framework, the strain energy density functional is reformulated by encoding a latent representation of stochastic constitutive parameters. By embedding material parameters directly into the neural network alongside spatial coordinates, CPDEM transforms conventional spatial collocation points into parameter-aware material points. Trained in an unsupervised manner via expected energy minimization over the parameter domain, the pre-trained model continuously learns the solution manifold. Consequently, it enables zero-shot, real-time inference of displacement fields for unknown material parameters without requiring any dataset generation or model retraining. The proposed method is rigorously validated across diverse benchmarks, including linear elasticity, finite-strain hyperelasticity, and complex highly nonlinear contact mechanics. To the best of our knowledge, CPDEM represents the first purely physics-driven deep learning paradigm capable of simultaneously and efficiently handling continuous multi-parameter variations in solid mechanics.
Mar 26, 2026

Toward Actionable Digital Twins for Radiation-Based Imaging and Therapy: Mathematical Formulation, Modular Workflow, and an OpenKBP-Based Dose-Surrogate Prototype

Digital twins for radiation-based imaging and therapy are most useful when they assimilate patient data, quantify predictive uncertainty, and support clinically constrained decisions. This paper presents a modular framework for actionable digital twins in radiation-based imaging and therapy and instantiates its reproducible open-data component using the \openkbpfull{} benchmark. The framework couples PatientData, Model, Solver, Calibration, and Decision modules and formalizes latent-state updating, uncertainty propagation, and chance-constrained action selection. As an initial implementation, we build a GPU-ready PyTorch/MONAI reimplementation of the \openkbp{} starter pipeline: an 11-channel, 19.2M-parameter 3D U-Net trained with a masked loss over the feasible region and equipped with Monte Carlo dropout for voxel-wise epistemic uncertainty. To emulate the update loop on a static benchmark, we introduce decoder-only proxy recalibration and illustrate uncertainty-aware virtual-therapy evaluation using DVH-based and biological utilities. A complete three-fraction loop including recalibration, Monte Carlo inference, and spatial optimization executes in 10.3s. On the 100-patient test set, the model achieved mean dose and DVH scores of 2.65 and 1.82Gy, respectively, with 0.58~s mean inference time per patient. The \openkbp{} case study thus serves as a reproducible test bed for dose prediction, uncertainty propagation, and proxy closed-loop adaptation, while future institutional studies will address longitudinal calibration with delivered-dose logs and repeat imaging.
Mar 26, 2026

Uncertainty Quantification for Quantum Computing

This review is designed to introduce mathematicians and computational scientists to quantum computing (QC) through the lens of uncertainty quantification (UQ) by presenting a mathematically rigorous and accessible narrative for understanding how noise and intrinsic randomness shape quantum computational outcomes in the language of mathematics. By grounding quantum computation in statistical inference, we highlight how mathematical tools such as probabilistic modeling, stochastic analysis, Bayesian inference, and sensitivity analysis, can directly address error propagation and reliability challenges in today's quantum devices. We also connect these methods to key scientific priorities in the field, including scalable uncertainty-aware algorithms and characterization of correlated errors. The purpose is to narrow the conceptual divide between applied mathematics, scientific computing and quantum information sciences, demonstrating how mathematically rooted UQ methodologies can guide validation, error mitigation, and principled algorithm design for emerging quantum technologies, in order to address challenges and opportunities present in modern-day quantum high performance and fault-tolerant quantum computing paradigms.
Mar 26, 2026

LogitScope: A Framework for Analyzing LLM Uncertainty Through Information Metrics

Understanding and quantifying uncertainty in large language model (LLM) outputs is critical for reliable deployment. However, traditional evaluation approaches provide limited insight into model confidence at individual token positions during generation. To address this issue, we introduce LogitScope, a lightweight framework for analyzing LLM uncertainty through token-level information metrics computed from probability distributions. By measuring metrics such as entropy and varentropy at each generation step, LogitScope reveals patterns in model confidence, identifies potential hallucinations, and exposes decision points where models exhibit high uncertainty, all without requiring labeled data or semantic interpretation. We demonstrate LogitScope's utility across diverse applications including uncertainty quantification, model behavior analysis, and production monitoring. The framework is model-agnostic, computationally efficient through lazy evaluation, and compatible with any HuggingFace model, enabling both researchers and practitioners to inspect LLM behavior during inference.
Mar 25, 2026

No Single Metric Tells the Whole Story: A Multi-Dimensional Evaluation Framework for Uncertainty Attributions

Research on explainable AI (XAI) has frequently focused on explaining model predictions. More recently, methods have been proposed to explain prediction uncertainty by attributing it to input features (uncertainty attributions). However, the evaluation of these methods remains inconsistent as studies rely on heterogeneous proxy tasks and metrics, hindering comparability. We address this by aligning uncertainty attributions with the well-established Co-12 framework for XAI evaluation. We propose concrete implementations for the correctness, consistency, continuity, and compactness properties. Additionally, we introduce conveyance, a property tailored to uncertainty attributions that evaluates whether controlled increases in epistemic uncertainty reliably propagate to feature-level attributions. We demonstrate our evaluation framework with eight metrics across combinations of uncertainty quantification and feature attribution methods on tabular and image data. Our experiments show that gradient-based methods consistently outperform perturbation-based approaches in consistency and conveyance, while Monte-Carlo dropconnect outperforms Monte-Carlo dropout in most metrics. Although most metrics rank the methods consistently across samples, inter-method agreement remains low. This suggests no single metric sufficiently evaluates uncertainty attribution quality. The proposed evaluation framework contributes to the body of knowledge by establishing a foundation for systematic comparison and development of uncertainty attribution methods.
Mar 25, 2026

Confidence Matters: Uncertainty Quantification and Precision Assessment of Deep Learning-based CMR Biomarker Estimates Using Scan-rescan Data

The performance of deep learning (DL) methods for the analysis of cine cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is typically assessed in terms of accuracy, overlooking precision. In this work, uncertainty estimation techniques, namely deep ensemble, test-time augmentation, and Monte Carlo dropout, are applied to a state-of-the-art DL pipeline for cardiac functional biomarker estimation, and new distribution-based metrics are proposed for the assessment of biomarker precision. The model achieved high accuracy (average Dice 87%) and point estimate precision on two external validation scan-rescan CMR datasets. However, distribution-based metrics showed that the overlap between scan/rescan confidence intervals was >50% in less than 45% of the cases. Statistical similarity tests between scan and rescan biomarkers also resulted in significant differences for over 65% of the cases. We conclude that, while point estimate metrics might suggest good performance, distributional analyses reveal lower precision, highlighting the need to use more representative metrics to assess scan-rescan agreement.
Mar 25, 2026

Beyond Static Uncertainty: Modeling Temporal Uncertainty Dynamics for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Real-world time series exhibit temporally structured uncertainty: volatility clusters in turbulent regimes, dissipates in stable periods, and shifts abruptly around structural breaks. Yet many probabilistic forecasting methods estimate predictive uncertainty as an independent per-step quantity, leaving the evolution and persistence of volatility regimes under-modeled. We formalize this missing dimension as temporal uncertainty dynamics and instantiate it in the Volatility Dynamics Variational Autoencoder (VolDy-VAE), a non-autoregressive generative forecaster with a location-scale decoder. VolDy-VAE combines a location path for mean prediction with a recurrent scale path that transfers and evolves a volatility hidden state from the look-back window to the forecasting horizon, enabling temporally coherent predictive variances. This design yields an adaptive attenuation mechanism: high-variance observations receive lower influence on the location estimate while their uncertainty is preserved through explicit scale predictions. We further provide a simplified regime-switching analysis showing that, when variances are known or consistently estimated, the volatility-aware objective reduces to inverse-variance weighting, whereas MSE-based estimators remain unbiased but statistically inefficient. Experiments on nine benchmarks show that VolDy-VAE improves forecasting accuracy and uncertainty calibration over competitive probabilistic and point-forecasting baselines while maintaining low inference latency; plug-in studies further indicate that the VolDy principle can benefit GAN, Koopman VAE, and Transformer backbones. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangyijunlyy/VolDy-VAE.
Mar 24, 2026

Robustness Quantification and Uncertainty Quantification: Comparing Two Methods for Assessing the Reliability of Classifier Predictions

We consider two approaches for assessing the reliability of the individual predictions of a classifier: Robustness Quantification (RQ) and Uncertainty Quantification (UQ). We explain the conceptual differences between the two approaches, compare both approaches on a number of benchmark datasets and show that RQ is capable of outperforming UQ, both in a standard setting and in the presence of distribution shift. Beside showing that RQ can be competitive with UQ, we also demonstrate the complementarity of RQ and UQ by showing that a combination of both approaches can lead to even better reliability assessments.