arXiv AI

CALIBER: Calibrating Confidence Before and After Reasoning in Language Models

arXiv:2606. 24281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

DirEAG: Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation for Calibrating Verbalized Confidence in Mathematical Reasoning

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
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
Sep 17

Confidence Comes from Experience: Experiential Confidence Estimation from Reasoning to Agents

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