arXiv AI
2d ago

Pinocchio: Fast Uncertainty Estimates for Black-Box Language Models

Pinocchio is an external calibrator that provides fast uncertainty estimates for black-box language models. It predicts the correctness of responses from seven trained LLMs with an AUROC of 0.862 and can transfer zero‑shot to thirteen unseen models from eight organizations. The method requires only a single forward pass and no access to the target model’s internal states, and a lightweight 0.8B checkpoint achieves comparable performance.

By Kevin David Hayes, Arka Pal, Haosong Zhang, Tom Goldstein, Micah Goldblum