Functional-level Uncertainty Quantification for Calibrated Fine-tuning on LLMs

Accurate uncertainty quantification of large language models (LLMs) provides credibility measure over their outputs. However, fine-tuned LLMs often struggle with overconfidence in uncertain predictions due to the limitations in the models' ability to generalize with limited data. Existing parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) uncertainty quantification methods for LLMs focus on post fine-tuning stage and fall short of calibrating epistemic uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose Functional-Level Uncertainty Quantification for Calibrated Fine-Tuning (UQ4CT), which captures and calibrates epistemic uncertainty over the space of functions that map input prompts to outputs. We implement UQ4CT during the fine-tuning stage via a mixture-of-experts framework that hierarchically decomposes the functional space. We demonstrate that UQ4CT reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by more than $25\%$ while maintaining high accuracy across $5$ benchmarks. Even under distribution shift, UQ4CT maintains superior ECE performance with high accuracy, showcasing improved generalizability.

@article{niu2025_2410.06431,
  title={ Functional-level Uncertainty Quantification for Calibrated Fine-tuning on LLMs },
  author={ Ruijia Niu and Dongxia Wu and Rose Yu and Yi-An Ma },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.06431},
  year={ 2025 }
}