ANCHOR: Abductive Network Construction with Hierarchical Orchestration for Reliable Probability Inference in Large Language Models
About
A central challenge in large-scale decision-making under incomplete information is estimating reliable probabilities. Recent approaches use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate explanatory factors and coarse-grained probability estimates, which are then refined by a Na\"ive Bayes model over factor combinations. However, sparse factor spaces often yield ``unknown'' predictions, while expanding factors increases noise and spurious correlations, weakening conditional independence and degrading reliability. To address these limitations, we propose \textsc{Anchor}, an aggregated Bayesian inference framework over a hierarchical factor space. It constructs dense factor hierarchies through iterative generation and clustering, maps contexts via hierarchical retrieval and refinement, and augments Na\"ive Bayes with a Causal Bayesian Network to model latent factor dependencies. Experiments show that \textsc{Anchor} markedly reduces ``unknown'' predictions and produces more reliable probability estimates than direct LLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing time and token overhead.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fact Checking | COVID-Fact | Balanced Acc72.6 | 32 | |
| Fact Checking | ExpertQA | Balanced Accuracy61.1 | 25 | |
| Pairwise Preference Evaluation | COMMON2SENSE | Context 1 Preference Score61 | 21 | |
| Fact Checking | Xsum | Balanced Accuracy56.4 | 10 | |
| Fact Checking | cnn | Balanced Accuracy62.1 | 10 | |
| Reasoning/Planning | TODAY | Accuracy81.7 | 10 | |
| Reasoning/Planning | PLASMA | Accuracy76.4 | 10 |