arXiv:2603.17839v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verbal confidence -- prompting LLMs to state their confidence as a number or category -- is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from...
The paper introduces a new method for measuring metacognitive abilities in large language models (LLMs) without relying on self-reports, instead testing how well models can use knowledge of their internal states. Using two experimental paradigms, the authors find that recent frontier LLMs can assess and use their own confidence when answering factual and reasoning questions, and can anticipate and appropriately employ the answers they would give. The study also shows that these abilities are limited in resolution, context-dependent, differ qualitatively from human metacognition, and vary across models with similar capabilities, suggesting post‑training processes influence metacognitive development.
arXiv:2606. 29490v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Confidence is an estimate of the probability that a chosen answer is correct.
The paper questions whether large language models (LLMs) truly introspect by critiquing recent studies that claim they can detect and report their internal states. It proposes two necessary conditions for genuine introspection: privileged access to internal representations and second‑order computation that distinguishes from first‑order task performance. Re‑examining two existing paradigms, the authors find that apparent introspective abilities can be explained by input‑based classifiers or generic anomaly detection, concluding that current evidence does not support metacognitive monitoring in LLMs.
arXiv:2608. 05224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models fine-tuned on human behavioural data have emerged as general-purpose cognitive proxies, but the scale this requires, and whether these models process task structure or exploit statistical shortcuts, remain open questions.
arXiv:2607. 12447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable confidence -- the probability that a model's own answer is correct -- is essential for the trustworthy deployment of language models.
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.
arXiv:2609. 16933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern predictive systems expose multiple quantities that are commonly interpreted as measures of confidence.
arXiv:2606. 09876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models often express high confidence in answers that are wrong.
arXiv:2607. 29062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model capabilities have improved in large part due to scaling chain of thought.
Reliable confidence -- the probability that a model's own answer is correct -- is essential for the trustworthy deployment of language models. Existing work has largely evaluated confidence by how well it predicts correctness and whether it is calibrated, leaving open a more fundamental question: what does the confidence signal itself represent?
arXiv:2608.28382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Users often ask large language models (LLMs) to report how confident they are, but it is unclear whether such linguistic confidence tracks the model's...