Journal article
Errors That Should Compound, and When They Do: The Product Rule Assumes Independent Steps, Conformal Guarantees Assume Exchangeable Instances, and the Unit of Independence Decides What Each Can Claim
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Two bodies of work quantify uncertainty in multi-step language-model reasoning, and both rest on an independence assumption placed at some unit. Step-level error models multiply per-step reliabilities, which, at an illustrative 95% per-step…