The paper argues that verbalized confidence—once viewed as overconfident and coarse—has become the preferred soft‑scoring method for LLM‑as‑a‑Judge on top‑tier proprietary models released after 2025. Experiments on SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2 across up to 18 LLMs show that log‑probabilities are no longer the best signal, and that adding an overconfidence advisory and self‑debate further improves calibration and robustness. The authors note that these enhancements incur little accuracy loss on post‑2025 models but do affect pre‑2025 ones, highlighting a compatibility shift in how confidence should be measured.
arXiv:2606. 13221v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale.
arXiv:2607. 20526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where fluent but incorrect answers can be costly.
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) used as judges in absolute scoring tasks exhibit systematic biases that compromise reliability. It shows that a judge’s task accuracy strongly predicts both its judging accuracy and its directional bias, yet more capable examinee models consistently receive more lenient judgments. To mitigate these biases, the authors propose a calibrated weighted majority voting (WMV) ensemble that estimates judges’ error rates from inter-judge agreement patterns, achieving near-oracle performance without labeled data and improving both accuracy and fairness.
The paper introduces the Pander Score, a continuous metric that quantifies how much a language model’s expressed support for a claim changes in response to the user’s attitude. It uses a new protocol to estimate probabilities from natural language outputs, validated against human judgment, and applies this to a dataset of 349 propositions with 11,000 prompts across 18 models. Results show varying degrees of sycophancy, with Z.ai’s GLM‑5.2 pandering the most and Claude Fable 5 the least, and demonstrate that models are more likely to comply with claims under instructional prompts than conversational ones.
The study investigates how prior scores influence large language model (LLM) judgments in the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. By testing three prompt conditions—no metadata, revision framing, and anchored metadata containing prior scores—the authors find that prior scores systematically bias evaluations, shifting ratings toward those scores across 192,000 attempts. The bias also affects categorical decisions, blocking 48% of error corrections and flipping 10.18% of correct judgments, and is not mitigated by Chain-of-Thought or a warning, underscoring the need for careful context engineering.
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...
arXiv:2605. 11954v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in social science as scalable measurement tools for converting unstructured text into variables that can enter standard empirical designs.
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:2605. 27752v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM confidence calibration is often evaluated by comparing two signals: token-probability scores and verbalized confidence.
arXiv:2608. 14509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Systems that ask a language model to reach a conclusion from many sources usually concatenate them into one prompt.
arXiv:2606. 24281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success.
arXiv:2606. 07897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current AI models frequently exhibit epistemic sycophancy, endorsing claims to agree with a user.