Qiwei Zhao


2025

pdf bib
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent
Qiwei Zhao | Dong Li | Yanchi Liu | Wei Cheng | Yiyou Sun | Mika Oishi | Takao Osaki | Katsushi Matsuda | Huaxiu Yao | Chen Zhao | Haifeng Chen | Xujiang Zhao
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large language models (LLMs) integrated into multi-step agent systems enable complex decision-making processes across various applications. However, their outputs often lack reliability, making uncertainty estimation crucial. Existing uncertainty estimation methods primarily focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over the multi-step decision-making process and the dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. To address these limitations, we propose SAUP (Situation Awareness Uncertainty Propagation), a novel framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process. SAUP incorporates situational awareness by assigning situational weights to each step’s uncertainty during the propagation. Our method, compatible with various one-step uncertainty estimation techniques, provides a comprehensive and accurate uncertainty measure. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAUP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 20% improvement in AUROC.