{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/mars-meaning-aware-response-scoring-for","title":"MARS: Meaning-Aware Response Scoring for Uncertainty Estimation in Generative LLMs","arxiv_id":"2402.11756","date":"2024-02-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yavuz Faruk Bakman","Duygu Nur Yaldiz","Baturalp Buyukates","Chenyang Tao","Dimitrios Dimitriadis","Salman Avestimehr"],"abstract":"Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely utilized for their excellence in various tasks. However, their tendency to produce inaccurate or misleading outputs poses a potential risk, particularly in high-stakes environments. Therefore, estimating the correctness of generative LLM outputs is an important task for enhanced reliability. Uncertainty Estimation (UE) in generative LLMs is an evolving domain, where SOTA probability-based methods commonly employ length-normalized scoring. In this work, we propose Meaning-Aware Response Scoring (MARS) as an alternative to length-normalized scoring for UE methods. MARS is a novel scoring function that considers the semantic contribution of each token in the generated sequence in the context of the question. We demonstrate that integrating MARS into UE methods results in a universal and significant improvement in UE performance. We conduct experiments using three distinct closed-book question-answering datasets across five popular pre-trained LLMs. Lastly, we validate the efficacy of MARS on a Medical QA dataset. Code can be found https://github.com/Ybakman/LLM_Uncertainity.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11756v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.11756v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"mars-meaning-aware-response-scoring-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/ybakman/llm_uncertainity","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2402.11756","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2402.11756"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/ybakman/llm_uncertainity","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"6156203f736f49e0","entry":"get_predictive_entropy_over_concepts","repo":"ybakman/llm_uncertainity","repo_kind":"official","path":"get_uncertainty.py","file_url":"https://github.com/ybakman/llm_uncertainity/blob/HEAD/get_uncertainty.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NOASSERTION","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"6156203f736f49e0"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}