arXiv AI

Assessing and Mitigating Miscalibration in LLM-Based Social Science Measurement

arXiv:2605. 11954v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in social science as scalable measurement tools for converting unstructured text into variables that can enter standard empirical designs.

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 11

Rethinking Verbalized Confidence for LLM-as-a-Judge: A Compatibility Shift on Post-2025 Proprietary Models

The paper argues that verbalized confidence—once viewed as overconfident and coarse—has become the preferred soft‑scoring method for LLM‑as‑a‑Judge on top‑tier proprietary models released after 2025. Experiments on SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2 across up to 18 LLMs show that log‑probabilities are no longer the best signal, and that adding an overconfidence advisory and self‑debate further improves calibration and robustness. The authors note that these enhancements incur little accuracy loss on post‑2025 models but do affect pre‑2025 ones, highlighting a compatibility shift in how confidence should be measured.

By Yu-Chung Hsiao
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
Aug 20

Debiased Inference for AI-Generated Data without Gold-Standard Labels: Identification via Multiple Imperfect Measurements

The paper introduces Debiased Inference with Multiple Imperfect Measurements (DMM), a framework that uses several error‑prone AI measurements to perform valid downstream statistical inference without requiring costly gold‑standard labels. By assuming conditional independence of the measurements given the true label and unit‑level features, DMM leverages CP decomposition and semiparametric theory to prove consistency and asymptotic normality of its estimator. Simulations demonstrate that DMM yields valid inference and can improve efficiency when additional imperfect measurements are available, and the authors provide diagnostics for the key independence assumption.

By Naoki Egami, Sooahn Shin