arXiv AI

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 11211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment.

arXiv AI
4d ago

Probability is Not Enough: Exploring and Counting Divergent Tokens for Reasoning Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs

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.

By Feiyang Li, Shengjing Liu, Qi Zhan, Sijie Cheng, Weiqing Wang, Hongwen Chen, Yuxuan Yang, Wen Wang, Yile Wang, Hui Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 17

The Metacognitive Bottleneck: Japanese Riddles Reveal Fundamental Limits of Machine Insight and Self-Evaluation in Reasoning AI

arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.

By Masaharu Mizumoto, Dat Nguyen, Zhiheng Han, Xingfu Li, Yo Nakawake, Le Minh Nguyen
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Thinking Past the Answer: Evaluating Harmful Overthinking in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.

By Simone Caldarella, Davide Talon, Rahaf Aljundi, Elisa Ricci, Massimiliano Mancini
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

ReFIne: A Framework for Trustworthy Large Reasoning Models with Reliability, Faithfulness, and Interpretability

ReFIne is a training framework that augments large reasoning models with three trustworthiness properties: interpretability, faithfulness, and reliability. It combines supervised fine‑tuning with GRPO to produce structured, tag‑based reasoning traces, explicitly disclose decisive information, and provide self‑assessments of soundness and confidence. Applied to Qwen3 models, ReFIne improves interpretability by 44.0 %, faithfulness by 18.8 %, and reliability by 42.4 % on mathematical benchmarks.

By Chung-En Sun, Ge Yan, Akshay Kulkarni, Tsui-Wei Weng