While Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, their unreliability remains a critical barrier to deployment in high-stakes domains. This survey charts a functional evolution in addressing this challenge: the evolution of uncertainty from a passive diagnostic metric to an active control signal guiding real-time model behavior. We demonstrate how uncertainty is leveraged as an active control signal across three frontiers: in advanced reasoning to optimize computation and trigger self-correction; in autonomous agents to govern metacognitive decisions about tool use and information seeking; and in reinforcement learning to mitigate reward hacking and enable self-improvement via intrinsic rewards. By grounding these advancements in emerging theoretical frameworks like Bayesian methods and Conformal Prediction, we provide a unified perspective on this transformative trend. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, critical analysis, and practical design patterns, arguing that mastering the new trend of uncertainty is essential for building the next generation of scalable, reliable, and trustworthy AI.
Zhiyuan Hu, Yucheng Wang +8
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks, yet it often suffers from exploration collapse: poli...
Zanlin Ni, Shenzhi Wang +9
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution sp...
Sungrae Park, Sanghoon Kim +35
We introduce Solar Open, a 102B-parameter bilingual Mixture-of-Experts language model for underserved languages. Solar Open demonstrates a systematic methodology for building competitive LLMs by addre...
Shaotian Yan, Kaiyuan Liu +7
In this report, we introduce DASD-4B-Thinking, a lightweight yet highly capable, fully open-source reasoning model. It achieves SOTA performance among open-source models of comparable scale across cha...
Sunzhu Li, Jiale Zhao +7
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in reasoning-intensive domains like mathematics. However, optimizing open-ended generation remains challenging due...
