The study trains ten open‑weight large language models (LLMs) to predict their own accuracy on factual multiple‑choice questions before answering. Results show that the models’ confidence signals split into two distinct patterns: early in training, confidence aligns with output consistency (how concentrated the answer distribution is), while later, it aligns with true accuracy but only on data similar to the training set. This indicates that calibration training may not universally teach LLMs to detect their own errors.
By Nicolas Yax, Stefano Palminteri, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
arXiv:2606. 19353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations.
By Jinseok Chung, Minkyoung Song, Hyunji Jung, Namhoon Lee
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
The paper introduces Test-Time Calibration Learning (TTCL), a label‑free framework that adapts both reasoning accuracy and verbalized confidence of large language models directly on unlabeled target‑task data. TTCL generates self‑supervision signals from multiple model responses, enabling calibration without ground‑truth labels and proving theoretically as a bounded surrogate for the ideal calibration objective. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and factual question answering show consistent improvements, with base models gaining an average 40.13% in accuracy and 70.80% in ECE reduction across eight benchmarks, and further gains under domain shift.
By Zizhuo Zhang, Xiong Peng, Jingwei Sun, Rong Yao, Shixiong Kai, Mingxuan Yuan, Bo Han
arXiv:2610.34994v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) often exhibit overconfident errors, assigning high confidence to incorrect predictions and thereby undermining reli...
By Jing Ren, Bowen Li, Ziqi Xu, Xuechao Yang, Feng Xia
PROOF is a benchmark that profiles the reliability of object-level facts in instruction-tuned language models by converting a frozen Wikidata snapshot into 18,486 English multiple-choice questions grounded in 11,779 semantic facts across 101 classes, 392 properties, and 14 domains. Each question includes an explicit "I don't know" option, a "No correct option" control, and nine controlled formulations, with 1,849 questions designed as no-correct-option traps. The study evaluates 18 open-weight model deployments on 166,374 prompts, revealing wide variability in factual accuracy, sensitivity to wording changes, and the impact of decoder perturbations.
By Andrei Chetvergov, Mikhail Solovev, Timofei Sivoraksha, Stepan Ukolov, Valeriia Kuschenko, Alexander Evseev, Sergey Bolovtsov
arXiv:2603. 25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment.
By Matt Gorbett, Suman Jana
arXiv:2607. 07626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable confidence estimation is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in confidence-aware systems, where downstream decisions such as retrieval, tool use, and adaptive computation depend on accurately estimating answer reliability.
By Sahil Kale
arXiv:2608. 09080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in medical question answering and clinical reasoning tasks.
By Maryam Tahermazandarani, Adnan Mahmood, Fahmida Islam, Quan Z. Sheng
Modern large language models (LLMs) often exhibit overconfident errors, assigning high confidence to incorrect predictions and thereby undermining reliability in real-world use. Existing calibration m...
arXiv:2610.07894v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are expected to answer questions faithfully based on the provided context, abstaining when the context information is in...
By Zizhuo Zhang, Xiong Peng, Jingwei Sun, Rong Yao, Borui Jiang, Bo Han
arXiv:2606. 32032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metacognition is a critical component of intelligence that describes the ability to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive processes.
By Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu, Avi Caciularu, Gal Yona, Idan Szpektor, Arman Cohan