arXiv:2604.08974v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification techniques measure confidence in language model outputs to support critical applications like hallucination detection an...
By Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Cesare Spinoso di-Piano, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
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
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
arXiv:2608. 05064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small open-weight language models increasingly run in private, offline, and cost-sensitive settings, where the key deployment question is not only what a model answers but when it should defer to a human.
By Jianru Shen
arXiv:2607. 19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration is the primary criterion for evaluating LLM confidence, but it is insufficient: it admits trivially incoherent estimators, depends on the evaluation distribution, and does not test the extent to which the estimation can be interpreted as a consistent, underlying probability function.
By Krish Matta, Atharv Naphade, Andy Zou
As the chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities of large language models improve, evaluating and calibrating their reasoning confidence is becoming increasingly important for quantifying the uncertaint...