Large language models increasingly produce and interpret verbal probability expressions, yet whether these expressions carry consistent meaning across models (or match human perceptions of uncertainty...
The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) express uncertainty compared to humans, noting that humans use verbal markers like "possible" or "likely" to convey metacognitive awareness. By curating a corpus of human uncertainty markers and benchmarking LLMs against it, the authors find that LLMs encode these markers with numerical levels that differ substantially from human usage. They introduce METHODNAME, an optimization-based algorithm that learns an optimal uncertainty profile over verbal markers directly from LLM outputs, enabling a direct comparison of confidence semantics and revealing systematic disparities in verbal expressions.
By Jinhao Duan, Zicheng Liu, Zijie Liu, Kaidi Xu, Tianlong Chen
The paper investigates the relationship between a large language model’s internal probability distribution and its verbalized confidence statements. By systematically manipulating training and in‑context data, the authors show that both internal and verbalized probabilities are influenced by distributional and asserted uncertainty in the data. They find that verbalized probabilities align with internal ones beyond what would be expected if they tracked the same sources independently, indicating that verbalized confidence can serve as a probe of the model’s internal distribution.
By Sinead Williamson, Jiaxuan Li, Nick Foti, Russ Webb, Masha Fedzechkina
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...
arXiv:2607. 03882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as post-hoc explainers of AI-generated outputs, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably communicate probabilistic information in natural language.
By Diego Cerda-Mardini, Sarath Chandar, Sreenath Madathil
arXiv:2509.15114v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: A controversial test for Large Language Models concerns the ability to discern possible from impossible language. While some evidence attests to th...
By Evelina Leivada, Raquel Montero, Paolo Morosi, Natalia Moskvina, Tamara Serrano, Nikoleta Pantelidou, Marcel Aguilar, Fritz Guenther