arXiv:2607. 07626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable confidence estimation is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in confidence-aware systems, where downstream decisions such as retrieval, tool use, and adaptive computation depend on accurately estimating answer reliability.
arXiv:2604.08974v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty quantification techniques measure confidence in language model outputs to support critical applications like hallucination detection an...
arXiv:2608. 07827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence estimation for large language models (LLMs) aims to estimate the probability that a generated answer is correct, while calibration aligns these estimates with empirical accuracy.
arXiv:2605. 31220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Confidence estimation (CE), i.
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...
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...
The study trains ten open‑weight large language models (LLMs) to predict their own accuracy on factual multiple‑choice questions before answering. Results show that the models’ confidence signals split into two distinct patterns: early in training, confidence aligns with output consistency (how concentrated the answer distribution is), while later, it aligns with true accuracy but only on data similar to the training set. This indicates that calibration training may not universally teach LLMs to detect their own errors.
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.
The paper investigates whether language models’ self-reported confidence is meaningful without additional training. By evaluating three training‑free signals—direct verbalization, post‑hoc probability estimates, and agreement across multiple generations—on 100 TriviaQA questions, the authors find that direct verbalization alone achieves high AUROC scores (0.956 and 0.937) for correctness prediction, while agreement-based methods perform noticeably worse. Re‑eliciting confidence for the same answers shows modest score shifts and occasional decision flips, and an audit of biography claims reveals only a small confidence gap between supported and contradicted statements.
The paper investigates token‑level certainty as a proxy for correctness in large language models. It finds that certainty better predicts whether a model will answer a question correctly than it does whether a specific response is correct, and that certainty varies by token type and position. The authors show that using certainty early in generation to allocate responses and later to weight votes improves accuracy while dramatically cutting token cost.
arXiv:2507.21931v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce plausible but poorly-calibrated answers, limiting their reliability on reasoning-intensive tasks....
Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation. We investigate whether verbalized confidence from black-box language models can serve as an actionable signal for retrieval routing.
The paper introduces TASCO, a test‑time adaptation framework that enhances Large Language Model reasoning by incorporating local stability into confidence‑based adaptation while keeping the model frozen. TASCO optimizes a lightweight task‑level prefix using two perturbation strategies—Random Perturbation for distributional stability and Sharpness‑Aware Perturbation for worst‑case sensitivity—to ensure that high confidence aligns with correctness. Experiments show that TASCO improves reasoning accuracy and token efficiency across various LLMs and benchmarks, and behavioral analyses confirm that it maintains stable confidence without over‑concentrating the predictive distribution.