Solomonoff-Inspired Hypothesis Ranking with LLMs for Prediction Under Uncertainty

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Barber, Josh, Young, Rourke, Coombe, Cameron, Browne, Will
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Barber, Josh
Young, Rourke
Coombe, Cameron
Browne, Will
author_facet Barber, Josh
Young, Rourke
Coombe, Cameron
Browne, Will
contents Reasoning under uncertainty is a key challenge in AI, especially for real-world tasks, where problems with sparse data demands systematic generalisation. Existing approaches struggle to balance accuracy and simplicity when evaluating multiple candidate solutions. We propose a Solomonoff-inspired method that weights LLM-generated hypotheses by simplicity and predictive fit. Applied to benchmark (Mini-ARC) tasks, our method produces Solomonoff-weighted mixtures for per-cell predictions, yielding conservative, uncertainty-aware outputs even when hypotheses are noisy or partially incorrect. Compared to Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA), Solomonoff scoring spreads probability more evenly across competing hypotheses, while BMA concentrates weight on the most likely but potentially flawed candidates. Across tasks, this highlights the value of algorithmic information-theoretic priors for interpretable, reliable multi-hypothesis reasoning under uncertainty.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17145
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Solomonoff-Inspired Hypothesis Ranking with LLMs for Prediction Under Uncertainty
Barber, Josh
Young, Rourke
Coombe, Cameron
Browne, Will
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
Reasoning under uncertainty is a key challenge in AI, especially for real-world tasks, where problems with sparse data demands systematic generalisation. Existing approaches struggle to balance accuracy and simplicity when evaluating multiple candidate solutions. We propose a Solomonoff-inspired method that weights LLM-generated hypotheses by simplicity and predictive fit. Applied to benchmark (Mini-ARC) tasks, our method produces Solomonoff-weighted mixtures for per-cell predictions, yielding conservative, uncertainty-aware outputs even when hypotheses are noisy or partially incorrect. Compared to Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA), Solomonoff scoring spreads probability more evenly across competing hypotheses, while BMA concentrates weight on the most likely but potentially flawed candidates. Across tasks, this highlights the value of algorithmic information-theoretic priors for interpretable, reliable multi-hypothesis reasoning under uncertainty.
title Solomonoff-Inspired Hypothesis Ranking with LLMs for Prediction Under Uncertainty
topic Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17145