arXiv:2609.07395cs.IR2026-09

为智能体系统建立不确定性评估框架,揭示其错误根源与可信度判断方法。

Uncertainty Quantification for LLM Agents: A Taxonomy, an Evaluation Protocol, and an Empirical Study

  • 构建三维度分类体系,区分不确定性来源、估计方式与作用环节。
  • 实验证明单步置信度无法保证全程可靠性,50步轨迹中误差呈耦合趋势。
  • 提出新评估指标TC-ECE,可发现长期任务中被平均掩盖的过自信问题。

大型语言模型已从单轮对话转向多轮协作的智能体系统,涉及规划、工具调用、记忆维护等复杂行为。然而,现有不确定性量化方法主要针对单轮问答,难以应对多轮交互、外部环境及工具使用带来的累积误差。本文指出,错误与不确定性源于多轮流程中的多个环节,且单一粗粒度置信分数无法准确反映系统可靠性。为此,提出三轴分类法(不确定性类型、估计方法、产生位置),并验证了步骤级与轨迹级校准的非等价性。在四个模型上基于真实智能体轨迹进行实验,最长达50步,结果表明:所提指标TC-ECE可有效计算;单步置信度不优于简单基线;全局平均会掩盖后期过自信现象,需按不同时间跨度分析。该研究明确了智能体不确定性来源,提出了更精细的可信度评估方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models (LLMs) are no longer deployed only for single-turn conversation but increasingly act as agents that plan, call tools, retrieve evidence, maintain memory, and interact over long horizons, often together with other agents through multi-turn conversations. Therefore, knowing when to trust the agentic system is a prerequisite for safe deployment. However, existing work on quantifying uncertainty for LLMs was built almost entirely for single-turn question answering. This paper argues that errors and uncertainty arise from multi-turn conversations, environments, and tools rather than from a single-turn question answering setting. It comes late, however, and is compounded in a single score that is too coarse to represent the unreliability. We organize the literature with a three-axis taxonomy, (1) what the uncertainty is, (2) how it is estimated, and (3) where uncertainty arises during an agent pipeline. We investigate step-level and trajectory-level calibration and show with a simple counterexample that the first does not imply the second. Experiments on real agent traces across four models and up to a 50-step budget show that the proposed metric and reporting protocol (Trajectory-Checkpoint Expected Calibration Error, TC-ECE) can be computed and that step errors are coupled along a trajectory. We find that confidence estimates from the agent's own responses do not consistently outperform a simple baseline. The experiments also show that averaging all trajectories together can hide overconfidence at later stages, which becomes visible when results are analyzed across different horizons. In simpler terms, this paper identifies where the uncertainty comes from in the agentic system pipeline, how to teach agents to know when they are wrong, and why one confidence number is not enough.

LLM智能体不确定性量化校准评估

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