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[Submitted on 6 Sep 2026] Title:"very likely" Means "uncertain"? How LLMs Diverge from Humans in Linguistic Uncertainty Quantification View a PDF of the paper titled "very likely" Means "uncertain"? How LLMs Diverge from Humans in Linguistic Uncertainty Quantification, by Jinhao Duan and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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 LLMs encode verbal uncertainty with numerical levels that differ substantially from those of humans. We then introduce METHODNAME, a novel optimization-based algorithm that learns an optimal uncertainty profile over uncertainty markers directly from LLM outputs. By fitting a marker-uncertainty mapping to best explain empirical correctness, METHODNAME discovers how much probability mass each verbal marker should convey, rather than estimating uncertainty via repeated sampling. METHODNAME enables a direct, marker-level comparison of confidence semantics between humans and LLMs, disentangling mismatch and revealing systematic confidence disparities in verbal expressions. Comments: ICML 2026 Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2610.00083 [cs.LG] (or arXiv:2610.00083v1 [cs.LG] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.00083 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Zijie Liu [view email] [v1] Sun, 6 Sep 2026 19:31:45 UTC (897 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled "very likely" Means "uncertain"? How LLMs Diverge from Humans in Linguistic Uncertainty Quantification, by Jinhao Duan and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.LG new | recent | 2026-10 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Loading... Data provided by: Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) IArxiv recommender toggle IArxiv Recommender (What is IArxiv?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)