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

Calibration Is Not Enough: Evaluating Confidence Estimation Under Language Variations

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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.

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