The study evaluates how large language models (LLMs) interpret verbal probability expressions by mapping words to numbers and testing consistency across 19 models. Results show that LLMs largely mirror human benchmarks—preserving word order, recovering key anchor points, and reflecting the high variance of the term "possible"—but they exhibit a systematic upward bias for negative expressions like "unlikely" and "improbable." Explanation elicitation reduces within‑model variance but increases divergence between models, while a bidirectional roundtrip test reveals that leading models maintain coherent internal representations.
Large language models increasingly produce and interpret verbal probability expressions, yet whether these expressions carry consistent meaning across models (or match human perceptions of uncertainty...
The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) express uncertainty compared to humans, noting that humans use verbal markers like "possible" or "likely" to convey metacognitive awareness. By curating a corpus of human uncertainty markers and benchmarking LLMs against it, the authors find that LLMs encode these markers with numerical levels that differ substantially from human usage. They introduce METHODNAME, an optimization-based algorithm that learns an optimal uncertainty profile over verbal markers directly from LLM outputs, enabling a direct comparison of confidence semantics and revealing systematic disparities in verbal expressions.
The paper investigates the relationship between a large language model’s internal probability distribution and its verbalized confidence statements. By systematically manipulating training and in‑context data, the authors show that both internal and verbalized probabilities are influenced by distributional and asserted uncertainty in the data. They find that verbalized probabilities align with internal ones beyond what would be expected if they tracked the same sources independently, indicating that verbalized confidence can serve as a probe of the model’s internal distribution.
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:2607. 03882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as post-hoc explainers of AI-generated outputs, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably communicate probabilistic information in natural language.
arXiv:2509.15114v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A controversial test for Large Language Models concerns the ability to discern possible from impossible language. While some evidence attests to th...
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.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled sophisticated reasoning and content generation, yet their inherent stochasticity poses significant challenges for ensuring predictive credibility. While traditional uncertainty taxonomy paradigms, such as the dichotomy of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, provide conceptual foundations, they often fail to capture the multi-component and multi-stage nature of LLM generation and struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods.
Large language models are informing decisions with ever-higher stakes. As the consequences of their errors grow, a central question becomes harder to ignore: how much can we trust an individual answer...
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...
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...
arXiv:2610.09087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are informing decisions with ever-higher stakes. As the consequences of their errors grow, a central question becomes harder to...