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
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 accuracy, predicts that a fifty-step chain succeeds about…