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: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.
By Dharshan Kumaran, Viorica Patraucean, Maks Ovsanikov, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c, Nathaniel Daw
arXiv:2603.22161v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Metacognition -- assessing the quality of one's own cognitive performance -- guides adaptive behavior across species. Substantial research demonstr...
By Dharshan Kumaran, Nathaniel Daw, Simon Osindero, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c, Viorica Patraucean
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...
By Dharshan Kumaran, Arthur Conmy, Federico Barbero, Simon Osindero, Viorica Patraucean, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c
arXiv:2607. 16451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chat models sometimes commit to an answer and then produce reasoning that justifies it rather than deriving it -- even when the answer contradicts a task premise.
By Heejin Jo
The paper shows that large language model agents are far more likely to commit to a directional answer when presented with a professional-looking market panel, even if the panel’s data is fabricated. Across 12 frontier models, commitment rates jump from 6.5 % for a bare question to 54.0 % with evidence, and remain high (≈37 %) even when all numbers are invented. The study finds that the act/don’t‑act decision gate is the key failure point, can be trained to reduce false commitments, but is fragile to response format changes.
arXiv:2605. 27752v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM confidence calibration is often evaluated by comparing two signals: token-probability scores and verbalized confidence.
By Hankyeol Kim, Pilsung Kang
arXiv:2609.32964v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Language models (LMs) often hallucinate by committing to confident answers rather than abstaining, even when they do not have enough information to...
By Vy Nguyen, Ziqi Xu, Jeffrey Chan, Estrid He, Feng Xia, Renqiang Luo, Erik Cambria, Xiuzhen Zhang
The study shows that large language model (LLM) agents are far more likely to commit to a directional prediction when presented with a professional‑looking market panel than when asked the same question directly, with commitment rates rising from 6.5% to 54.0% across 12 frontier models. Even when the panel’s data is entirely fabricated, commitment still increases significantly, indicating that the authority of the presentation, rather than the truth of the information, drives confident action. The authors demonstrate that this act/don’t‑act decision gate is narrow, model‑specific, and can be mitigated through supervised fine‑tuning, though its effectiveness depends on response format and context.
whyItMatters":"The findings reveal a specific vulnerability in LLMs where presentation style can override factual accuracy, highlighting the need for careful design and training to prevent misleading confidence in uncertain scenarios."
By Pranav Aggarwal
arXiv:2608. 09080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in medical question answering and clinical reasoning tasks.
By Maryam Tahermazandarani, Adnan Mahmood, Fahmida Islam, Quan Z. Sheng
arXiv:2606. 25013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Today's reasoning models use thinking tokens to attain stronger performance on benchmarks than their instruction-tuned counterparts.
By Narutatsu Ri, Abhishek Panigrahi, Sanjeev Arora
arXiv:2606. 03969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable uncertainty communication is critical to the trustworthiness of LLMs, yet faithful calibration (FC)--the alignment between models' intrinsic and (linguistically) expressed confidence--is a persistent failure mode.
By Areeb Gani, Asal Meskin, Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu, Arman Cohan