OpenEstimate: Evaluating LLMs on Reasoning Under Uncertainty with Real-World Data

Abstract

Real-world settings where language models (LMs) are deployed -- in domains spanning healthcare, finance, and other forms of knowledge work -- require models to grapple with incomplete information and reason under uncertainty. Yet most LM evaluations focus on problems with well-defined answers and success criteria. This gap exists in part because natural problems involving uncertainty are difficult to construct: given that LMs have access to most of the same knowledge as humans, it is non-trivial to design questions for which LMs will struggle to produce correct answers, but which humans can answer reliably. As a result, LM performance on reasoning under uncertainty remains poorly characterized. To address this gap, we introduce OpenEstimate, an extensible, multi-domain benchmark for evaluating LMs on numerical estimation tasks that require models to synthesize significant amounts of background information and express predictions as probabilistic priors. We assess these priors for accuracy and calibration, quantifying their usefulness relative to samples from the true distribution of interest. Across six frontier LMs, we find that LM-elicited priors are often inaccurate and overconfident. Performance improves modestly depending on how uncertainty is elicited from the model, but is largely unaffected by changes in sampling strategy, reasoning effort, or prompt design. The OpenEstimate benchmark thus offers a challenging evaluation for frontier LMs and a platform for developing models that are better at probabilistic estimation and reasoning under uncertainty.