arXiv AI
Sep 25

PROOF: Profiling Reliability of Object-Level Facts in Large Language Models

PROOF is a benchmark that profiles the reliability of object-level facts in instruction-tuned language models by converting a frozen Wikidata snapshot into 18,486 English multiple-choice questions grounded in 11,779 semantic facts across 101 classes, 392 properties, and 14 domains. Each question includes an explicit "I don't know" option, a "No correct option" control, and nine controlled formulations, with 1,849 questions designed as no-correct-option traps. The study evaluates 18 open-weight model deployments on 166,374 prompts, revealing wide variability in factual accuracy, sensitivity to wording changes, and the impact of decoder perturbations.

By Andrei Chetvergov, Mikhail Solovev, Timofei Sivoraksha, Stepan Ukolov, Valeriia Kuschenko, Alexander Evseev, Sergey Bolovtsov
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

An Analysis of Training-Free Self-Reported Confidence in Language Models

The paper investigates whether language models’ self-reported confidence is meaningful without additional training. By evaluating three training‑free signals—direct verbalization, post‑hoc probability estimates, and agreement across multiple generations—on 100 TriviaQA questions, the authors find that direct verbalization alone achieves high AUROC scores (0.956 and 0.937) for correctness prediction, while agreement-based methods perform noticeably worse. Re‑eliciting confidence for the same answers shows modest score shifts and occasional decision flips, and an audit of biography claims reveals only a small confidence gap between supported and contradicted statements.

By Lukas Meyer, Sofia Rossi, Wei Chen, Thomas Laurent, Yiming Li
arXiv AI
Aug 24

DirEAG: Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation for Calibrating Verbalized Confidence in Mathematical Reasoning

DirEAG introduces a Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation technique to calibrate verbalized confidence in large language models performing mathematical reasoning. By converting each elicited answer-confidence pair into calibrated soft evidence over candidate answers and a null state, it addresses prompt- and task-dependent bias that simple averaging or heuristic aggregation cannot handle. Experiments on GSM8K, SVAMP, and GSM-Hard with Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma models demonstrate that DirEAG achieves better calibration while maintaining competitive answer selection compared to existing methods.

By Haorui Xu, Yuzhou Zhu, Liyuan Gao