arXiv:2608. 19323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2504.18346v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been transformative across many domains. However, hallucination, i.e., confidently outputting incorrect inf...
The paper investigates the "score granularity gap" in black-box large language model (LLM) classifiers, asking how finely a confidence score can be thresholded for deployment. By comparing seven confidence construction methods across 25 model-dataset pairs, the authors find that single-shot verbalized confidence, when properly converted to a probability, ranks well but offers only a few distinct threshold values, limiting operational flexibility. The study also shows that multi-query aggregation can improve weak models but may harm strong ones, and provides concrete guidance for deployment trade-offs.
arXiv:2606. 19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs.
arXiv:2609.10122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a broad range of classification settings, yet the reliability of their predictions...
arXiv:2604.08974v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty quantification techniques measure confidence in language model outputs to support critical applications like hallucination detection an...
arXiv:2511. 21140v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as scalable evaluators of model responses in lieu of human annotators.
Uncertainty estimation is essential not only for the trustworthy deployment of large language models (LLMs) but also as a foundation for self-refinement in LLM generation. However, existing approaches operate at suboptimal granularities: token-level scores lack semantic coherence, while sequence-level scores fail to localize errors.
The paper introduces a new evaluation framework for confidence estimation in large language models, focusing on three properties: robustness to prompt changes, stability across semantically equivalent answers, and sensitivity to semantically different answers. It demonstrates that existing confidence estimation methods perform well on robustness and stability but often fail to detect differences in answer meaning, revealing gaps in current evaluation practices. The framework aims to guide the selection of confidence estimators for practical applications.
arXiv:2606. 03846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse tasks, but they often generate responses that appear plausible while being factually incorrect.
The paper introduces Divergent Token Confidence (DTC), a method that estimates large language model confidence by counting tokens where two models strongly disagree during decoding. DTC uses Jensen-Shannon divergence between next-token distributions along the same reasoning trajectory and shows a near-negative correlation with answer accuracy. Experiments on multiple model families and six mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that DTC improves calibration over traditional probability-based and verbalized baselines, achieving lower expected calibration errors in both white-box and black-box settings.
As the chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities of large language models improve, evaluating and calibrating their reasoning confidence is becoming increasingly important for quantifying the uncertaint...
arXiv:2602.13540v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate confidence estimation is critical for reliable use of large language models (LLMs). Prior work on LLM calibration largely focuses on...