GENUINE: Graph Enhanced Multi-level Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Models

Tuo Wang, Adithya Kulkarni, Tyler Cody, Peter A. Beling, Yujun Yan, Dawei Zhou


Abstract
Uncertainty estimation is essential for enhancing the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in high-stakes applications. Existing methods often overlook semantic dependencies, relying on token-level probability measures that fail to capture structural relationships within the generated text. We propose GENUINE: Graph ENhanced mUlti-level uncertaINty Estimation for Large Language Models, a structure-aware framework that leverages dependency parse trees and hierarchical graph pooling to refine uncertainty quantification. By incorporating supervised learning, GENUINE effectively models semantic and structural relationships, improving confidence assessments. Extensive experiments across NLP tasks show that GENUINE achieves up to 29% higher AUROC than semantic entropy-based approaches and reduces calibration errors by over 15%, demonstrating the effectiveness of graph-based uncertainty modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/ODYSSEYWT/GUQ.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.1119
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
20522–20541
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1119/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tuo Wang, Adithya Kulkarni, Tyler Cody, Peter A. Beling, Yujun Yan, and Dawei Zhou. 2025. GENUINE: Graph Enhanced Multi-level Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 20522–20541, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GENUINE: Graph Enhanced Multi-level Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Models (Wang et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1119.pdf
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