arXiv AI

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

arXiv:2606. 07822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Calibration as a First-Class Criterion in LLM Evaluation

The paper argues that calibration—how well a language model’s confidence aligns with its actual correctness—should be a standard evaluation metric for large language models (LLMs). It notes that while calibration metrics exist, they are rarely applied outside specialized NLP subfields, leading to unverified confidence scores in new models, datasets, and benchmarks. The authors highlight the risks of miscalibration both at deployment (overconfident errors causing harm) and in research workflows (affecting LLM-as-a-judge, synthetic data generation, and active learning). They call for every NLP subfield to pair its primary performance metric with a calibration score, treating calibration as an essential property of every model.

By Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Katharina von der Wense
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Calibration Is Not Enough: Evaluating Confidence Estimation Under Language Variations

The paper introduces a new evaluation framework for confidence estimation in large language models, focusing on three properties: robustness to prompt changes, stability across semantically equivalent answers, and sensitivity to semantically different answers. It demonstrates that existing confidence estimation methods perform well on robustness and stability but often fail to detect differences in answer meaning, revealing gaps in current evaluation practices. The framework aims to guide the selection of confidence estimators for practical applications.

By Yuxi Xia, Dennis Ulmer, Terra Blevins, Yihong Liu, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Benjamin Roth
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

A Calibrated Reflection Approach for Enhancing Confidence Estimation in LLMs

The paper introduces a Calibrated Reflection approach to improve confidence estimation in Large Language Models (LLMs). It combines structured reasoning with a distance‑aware calibration technique, featuring a Maximum Confidence Selection method, a reflection‑based prompting mechanism, and an ordinal‑aware calibration strategy. Experiments on datasets such as HelpSteer2, Llama T‑REx, and a proprietary conversational set show the method works for both conversational and fact‑based classification tasks.

By Umesh Bodhwani, Yuan Ling, Shujing Dong, Yarong Feng, Hongfei Li, Ayush Goyal
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

When Calibration Rankings Reverse: Accuracy-Controlled Evaluation for Fair Comparison of LLMs

The paper argues that traditional global calibration metrics, such as Expected Calibration Error and Brier Score, are confounded by differences in model accuracy when comparing large language models. It introduces ACE, an accuracy‑controlled evaluation framework that offers Instance‑Aligned, Distribution‑Aligned, and Candidate‑Aligned views to provide fairer cross‑model comparisons. Experiments across various benchmarks reveal that many reported calibration advantages disappear after accuracy control and that model rankings often reverse, indicating that raw global metrics are unreliable for cross‑model calibration assessment.

By Zhichao Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang, Chengzu Li, Nigel Collier, Deqing Yang
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Rethinking Uncertainty Evaluation in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration is the primary criterion for evaluating LLM confidence, but it is insufficient: it admits trivially incoherent estimators, depends on the evaluation distribution, and does not test the extent to which the estimation can be interpreted as a consistent, underlying probability function.

By Krish Matta, Atharv Naphade, Andy Zou