The paper introduces the first benchmark for evaluating confidence estimation in large language models during multi‑turn medical consultations, combining three types of medical data and an information sufficiency gradient to capture how confidence and correctness evolve as evidence accumulates. Experiments with 27 methods reveal that token‑level and consistency‑level confidence approaches are limited by medical data, and that medical reasoning must be judged on both diagnostic accuracy and information completeness. Building on these findings, the authors propose MedConf, a retrieval‑augmented, linguistically grounded self‑assessment framework that aligns patient information with supporting, missing, and contradictory relations, producing interpretable confidence estimates that outperform existing methods across multiple datasets and LLMs.
By Zhiyao Ren, Yibing Zhan, Siyuan Liang, Guozheng Ma, Baosheng Yu, Dacheng Tao
arXiv:2606. 07237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in healthcare for tasks such as clinical question answering, diagnosis support, and report summarization.
By Mahdi Alkaeed
The study examines how language models (LMs) alter the expressed certainty of statements when rewriting text, a process termed certainty distortion. Using an LM‑based metric aligned with human judgments, the authors find that up to 75% of LM outputs exhibit such distortion, with most models more likely to inflate certainty than reduce it. Repeated paraphrasing can amplify this effect, especially in medical contexts, and while prompt interventions help, they do not fully eliminate the bias.
By Catarina G Belem, Shang Wu, Hongyu Yao, Mark Steyvers, Sameer Singh, Padhraic Smyth
arXiv:2608.22483v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly support decision-making in high-stakes domains, but they often hallucinate and express confidence that is mis...
By Toghrul Abbasli, Kentaroh Toyoda, Yuan Wang, Li Chen
arXiv:2606. 07951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans increasingly turn to Language Models (LMs) in ways that shape beliefs and drive decisions, including discussing, rewriting, and summarizing information from scientific articles, news, and medical reports.
By Catarina G Belem, Shang Wu, Hongyu Yao, Mark Steyvers, Sameer Singh, Padhraic Smyth
arXiv:2604.02543v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in clinical decision support, more than accuracy is required: knowing when to trust thei...
By Ji Young Byun, Young-Jin Park, Jean-Philippe Corbeil, Asma Ben Abacha
arXiv:2607. 13036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision support in healthcare, but clinical evidence is often incomplete or evolving.
By Oriana Presacan, Andreea Grama, Larisa Irimin\u{a}, Alireza Nik, Jaya Ojha, Vajira Thambawita, Ciprian I. B\u{a}cil\u{a}, Bogdan Ionescu, Michael A. Riegler
arXiv:2606. 19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored.
By Akshat Dasula, Prasanna Desikan, Jaideep Srivastava
The paper evaluates uncertainty estimation (UE) methods for clinical vision‑language models (VLMs) on visual question answering (VQA). Across 8 UE techniques and 12 VLMs, UE quality tracks model accuracy, degrading where performance is weakest, and fails to signal uncertainty when models are stressed by hiding the correct answer (NOTA perturbations). However, UE on unperturbed inputs reliably predicts which predictions will collapse under NOTA, suggesting UE can diagnose model fragility.
By Arnisa Fazla, Alberto Testoni, Ameen Abu-Hanna, Barbara Plank, Iacer Calixto
arXiv:2509.19375v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used for clinical text classification, where overconfident misclassifications can directly affect pati...
By Mridul Sharma, Adeetya Patel, Zaneta D' Souza, Samira Abbasgholizadeh Rahimi, Siva Reddy, Sreenath Madathil
arXiv:2606. 03969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable uncertainty communication is critical to the trustworthiness of LLMs, yet faithful calibration (FC)--the alignment between models' intrinsic and (linguistically) expressed confidence--is a persistent failure mode.
By Areeb Gani, Asal Meskin, Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu, Arman Cohan
The paper introduces a prompt-response concept model that links the amount of task-relevant information in a prompt to the uncertainty of responses generated by large language models (LLMs). It identifies four sources of response uncertainty—prompt underspecification, model quality, task variability, and semantic redundancy—and demonstrates that uncertainty decreases as prompt informativeness or model quality increases, analogous to epistemic uncertainty in probabilistic models. Experiments on real-world datasets confirm the theoretical predictions and validate the model.
By Ze Yu Zhang, Arun Verma, Finale Doshi-Velez, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low