From Signals to Transfer: A Factorised Study of Probe-Based Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models

Probe-based uncertainty estimation (UE) has emerged as a prominent approach to detect hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning uncertainty from internal model signals. Yet, recent methods vary simultaneously across feature design, training data construction, and evaluation setting, obscuring what actually drives performance. To address this issue, we propose a factorised study of probe-based UE under matched conditions. Our results show that raw hidden states and attention features are difficult to outperform in-domain. However, under distribution shift, structured and compressed features are more robust, suggesting that in-domain performance alone is insufficient to measure progress. Furthermore, prompting and label construction significantly affect probe behaviour. Building on these best-practice findings, we train benchmark-based pretrained probes that transfer reasonably well to open-ended factual generation, providing a stable off-the-shelf baseline. Our work encourages more deployment-oriented evaluation of probe-based uncertainty estimators. The code repository is available at https://github.com/ponhvoan/ProbeUE.

Towards Reliable Truth-Aligned Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models

Uncertainty estimation (UE) aims to detect hallucinated outputs of large language models (LLMs) to improve their reliability. However, UE metrics often exhibit unstable performance across configurations, which significantly limits their applicability. In this work, we formalise this phenomenon as proxy failure, since most UE metrics originate from model behaviour, rather than being explicitly grounded in the factual correctness of LLM outputs. With this, we show that UE metrics become non-discriminative precisely in low-information regimes. To alleviate this, we propose Truth AnChoring (TAC), a post-hoc calibration method to remedy UE metrics, by mapping the raw scores to truth-aligned scores. Even with noisy and few-shot supervision, our TAC can support the learning of well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, and presents a practical calibration protocol. Our findings highlight the limitations of treating heuristic UE metrics as direct indicators of truth uncertainty, and position our TAC as a necessary step toward more reliable uncertainty estimation for LLMs. The code repository is available at https://github.com/ponhvoan/TruthAnchor/.

Uncover and Unlearn Nuisances: Agnostic Fully Test-Time Adaptation

Fully Test-Time Adaptation (FTTA) addresses domain shifts without access to source data and training protocols of the pre-trained models. Traditional strategies that align source and target feature distributions are infeasible in FTTA due to the absence of training data and unpredictable target domains. In this work, we exploit a dual perspective on FTTA, and propose Agnostic FTTA (AFTTA) as a novel formulation that enables the usage of off-the-shelf domain transformations during test-time to enable direct generalization to unforeseeable target data. To address this, we develop an uncover-and-unlearn approach. First, we uncover potential unwanted shifts between source and target domains by simulating them through predefined mappings and consider them as nuisances. Then, during test-time prediction, the model is enforced to unlearn these nuisances by regularizing the consequent shifts in latent representations and label predictions. Specifically, a mutual information-based criterion is devised and applied to guide nuisances unlearning in the feature space and encourage confident and consistent prediction in label space. Our proposed approach explicitly addresses agnostic domain shifts, enabling superior model generalization under FTTA constraints. Extensive experiments on various tasks, involving corruption and style shifts, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches.