arXiv Computation and Language By Federico Torrielli, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Lukas Galke Poech

Confidence and Calibration of Activation Oracles for Reliable Interpretation of Language Model Internals

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The paper investigates how to estimate confidence for activation oracles—language models that translate internal activations of other models into natural language. Five confidence estimation methods are compared across four oracles from Qwen and Gemma families (8B–27B parameters) on a secret‑word recovery task. Results show that when a hypothesis space is available, scoring candidate answers directly yields the best accuracy and confidence separation; when free‑text answers are required, sampling agreement over twenty outputs provides the most calibrated confidence, while a rescaled probability from a calibration set performs comparably with fewer generations. Asking the oracle to output a numeric confidence score proves ineffective.

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