"very likely" Means "uncertain"? How LLMs Diverge from Humans in Linguistic Uncertainty Quantification
Humans express uncertainty verbally via markers (e.g., "possible," "likely"), yet most LLM uncertainty quantification (UQ) relies on costing likelihood- or consistency-based signals. From a cognitive perspective, accurate verbal uncertainty reflects metacognitive monitoring, representing knowledge boundaries ("knowing that you don't know") to support regulation and information seeking. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs diverge from humans in verbal uncertainty quantification and whether verbal markers can reliably quantify LLM uncertainty. We curate a corpus of human uncertainty markers from psychology and decision-science literature and benchmark LLMs against it. We observe that LLM...
| Authors | Jinhao Duan, Zicheng Liu, Zijie Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 6 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 September 2026 |
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