arXiv AI

When Confidence Signals Disagree: Local and Global Confidence in Autoregressive Language Models

arXiv:2609. 16933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern predictive systems expose multiple quantities that are commonly interpreted as measures of confidence.

arXiv AI
Aug 14

Self-Referential Induction Increases Response Instability Relative to Unresolvable and Verifiable Questions in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 13258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-referential prompting has been shown to reliably induce large language models to produce first-person reports resembling subjective experience, but no prior work measures how consistent these reports are across repeated, independent trials, or how that consistency compares to the model's behavior on other kinds of open-ended questions.

By Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda
arXiv AI
2d ago

Confidence Comes from Experience: Experiential Confidence Estimation from Reasoning to Agents

The paper introduces XConf, an experiential confidence estimator that augments a language model’s current inference with a record of its past graded episodes. By recalling similar past tasks and reflecting on past outcomes, XConf generates confidence scores without accessing logits or updating weights, achieving superior discrimination and calibration across diverse benchmarks. The method demonstrates significant gains in selective prediction, improving success rates on agent tasks by up to 8.7 points.

By Caiqi Zhang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li, Yulong Chen, Dharshan Kumaran, Nigel Collier
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Rethinking Uncertainty Evaluation in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration is the primary criterion for evaluating LLM confidence, but it is insufficient: it admits trivially incoherent estimators, depends on the evaluation distribution, and does not test the extent to which the estimation can be interpreted as a consistent, underlying probability function.

By Krish Matta, Atharv Naphade, Andy Zou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

arXiv:2606. 17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings.

By SongEun Kim, Seungyoo Lee, Edwin Fong, Hyungi Lee, Juho Lee