How do LLMs Compute Verbal Confidence
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arXiv:2607. 07626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable confidence estimation is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in confidence-aware systems, where downstream decisions such as retrieval, tool use, and adaptive computation depend on accurately estimating answer reliability.
arXiv:2603.22161v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Metacognition -- assessing the quality of one's own cognitive performance -- guides adaptive behavior across species. Substantial research demonstr...
arXiv:2605. 27752v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM confidence calibration is often evaluated by comparing two signals: token-probability scores and verbalized confidence.
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.
arXiv:2608. 09080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in medical question answering and clinical reasoning tasks.
arXiv:2604.08974v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty quantification techniques measure confidence in language model outputs to support critical applications like hallucination detection an...