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