arXiv AI

Is This Your Final Answer? Cross-Contextual Consistency as a Measure of LLM Credibility

arXiv:2608. 10315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are powerful black-box systems, making it difficult to discern whether their answers reflect stable internal beliefs or superficial pattern matching.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Calibration Is Not Enough: Evaluating Confidence Estimation Under Language Variations

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.

By Yuxi Xia, Dennis Ulmer, Terra Blevins, Yihong Liu, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Benjamin Roth
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Semantic Calibration Prevails Where Token Confidence Fails: Benchmarking Long-Form Scientific QA

The paper presents the first large‑scale benchmark for uncertainty quantification (UQ) calibration in long‑form scientific question answering, evaluating four UQ methods on 685,000 responses from up to 20 large language models across seven datasets. It shows that instruction tuning leads to token‑level probability polarization, undermining token‑level uncertainty signals, while reasoning model families differ in how they handle this effect. Only semantic consistency—consistency of the final answer—provides well‑calibrated outputs, demonstrating that semantic calibration remains robust in multi‑step, dependency‑rich reasoning.

By Philip M\"uller, Nicholas Popovi\v{c}, Michael F\"arber, Peter Steinbach
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Can We Trust the Judges? Validation of Factuality Evaluation Methods via Answer Perturbation

arXiv:2609.15561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the factual correctness of large language models (LLMs) is vital for many applications. But are our evaluation tools themselves trustworthy?...

By Sarra Gharsallah, Adele Robaldo, Mariia Tokareva, Giovanni Gatti Pinheiro, Ilyana Guendouz, Rapha\"el Troncy, Paolo Papotti, Pietro Michiardi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

How Correct Is Your Answer? A Semantic Correctness Framework for Open QA Evaluation

The paper introduces a semantic correctness taxonomy that categorizes open‑ended QA answers into eight ordered classes, distinguishing between correct, verbose, and hallucinated responses. It releases two datasets—CAP‑Correctness and CAP‑Statements—to support benchmark evaluation and NLI‑based training. The authors also propose CAP (Context‑Aware Precision), a reference‑based metric that scores question‑conditioned statements via bidirectional NLI and demonstrates superior performance under a monotonicity protocol.

By Elitsa Yotkova, Violeta Kastreva, Petar Velkov, Hristo Boyanov, Dimitar Dimitrov, Ivan Koychev, Preslav Nakov
arXiv AI
Sep 25

PROOF: Profiling Reliability of Object-Level Facts in Large Language Models

PROOF is a benchmark that profiles the reliability of object-level facts in instruction-tuned language models by converting a frozen Wikidata snapshot into 18,486 English multiple-choice questions grounded in 11,779 semantic facts across 101 classes, 392 properties, and 14 domains. Each question includes an explicit "I don't know" option, a "No correct option" control, and nine controlled formulations, with 1,849 questions designed as no-correct-option traps. The study evaluates 18 open-weight model deployments on 166,374 prompts, revealing wide variability in factual accuracy, sensitivity to wording changes, and the impact of decoder perturbations.

By Andrei Chetvergov, Mikhail Solovev, Timofei Sivoraksha, Stepan Ukolov, Valeriia Kuschenko, Alexander Evseev, Sergey Bolovtsov
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Beyond Output Correctness: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Model Reasoning in Coding Tasks

The paper introduces CodeRQ-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing large language model reasoning quality across coding tasks such as generation, summarization, and classification. It analyzes over a thousand mismatches from existing evaluators, identifies recurring limitations, and derives design insights that lead to a new two‑stage evaluator, VERA. Experiments show VERA outperforms strong baselines, improving AUCROC by up to 0.26 and AUPRC by up to 0.21 on four datasets.

By Yuangang Li, Justin Tian Jin Chen, Ethan Yu, David Hong, Iftekhar Ahmed