arXiv:2606. 11211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment.
By Prakul Sunil Hiremath, Harshit R. Hiremath
arXiv:2508. 14390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often express verbal confidence that is poorly aligned with actual correctness, limiting their reliability in safety-critical applications.
By Ke Fang, Tianyi Zhao, Qianwen Wang, Lu Cheng
arXiv:2607. 20526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where fluent but incorrect answers can be costly.
By Matthew ffrench-Constant, Daniel Yang, Xinmeng Huang, Sanyam Kapoor
DirEAG introduces a Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation technique to calibrate verbalized confidence in large language models performing mathematical reasoning. By converting each elicited answer-confidence pair into calibrated soft evidence over candidate answers and a null state, it addresses prompt- and task-dependent bias that simple averaging or heuristic aggregation cannot handle. Experiments on GSM8K, SVAMP, and GSM-Hard with Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma models demonstrate that DirEAG achieves better calibration while maintaining competitive answer selection compared to existing methods.
By Haorui Xu, Yuzhou Zhu, Liyuan Gao
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:2604.08974v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification techniques measure confidence in language model outputs to support critical applications like hallucination detection an...
By Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Cesare Spinoso di-Piano, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
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:2604. 01170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While test-time scaling has enabled large language models to solve highly difficult tasks, state-of-the-art results come at exorbitant compute costs.
By Cai Zhou, Zekai Wang, Menghua Wu, Qianyu Julie Zhu, Flora C. Shi, Chenyu Wang, Ashia Wilson, Tommi Jaakkola, Stephen Bates
arXiv:2608. 05064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small open-weight language models increasingly run in private, offline, and cost-sensitive settings, where the key deployment question is not only what a model answers but when it should defer to a human.
By Jianru Shen
arXiv:2608.22483v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly support decision-making in high-stakes domains, but they often hallucinate and express confidence that is mis...
By Toghrul Abbasli, Kentaroh Toyoda, Yuan Wang, Li Chen
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
The paper introduces XConf, an experiential confidence estimator that augments a language model’s current inference with a record of its past graded episodes. By recalling similar past tasks and reflecting on past outcomes, XConf generates confidence scores without accessing logits or updating weights, achieving superior discrimination and calibration across diverse benchmarks. The method demonstrates significant gains in selective prediction, improving success rates on agent tasks by up to 8.7 points.
By Caiqi Zhang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li, Yulong Chen, Dharshan Kumaran, Nigel Collier