The paper introduces Divergent Token Confidence (DTC), a method that estimates large language model confidence by counting tokens where two models strongly disagree during decoding. DTC uses Jensen-Shannon divergence between next-token distributions along the same reasoning trajectory and shows a near-negative correlation with answer accuracy. Experiments on multiple model families and six mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that DTC improves calibration over traditional probability-based and verbalized baselines, achieving lower expected calibration errors in both white-box and black-box settings.
By Feiyang Li, Shengjing Liu, Qi Zhan, Sijie Cheng, Weiqing Wang, Hongwen Chen, Yuxuan Yang, Wen Wang, Yile Wang, Hui Huang
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...
ReFIne is a training framework that augments large reasoning models with three trustworthiness properties: interpretability, faithfulness, and reliability. It combines supervised fine‑tuning with GRPO to produce structured, tag‑based reasoning traces, explicitly disclose decisive information, and provide self‑assessments of soundness and confidence. Applied to Qwen3 models, ReFIne improves interpretability by 44.0 %, faithfulness by 18.8 %, and reliability by 42.4 % on mathematical benchmarks.
By Chung-En Sun, Ge Yan, Akshay Kulkarni, Tsui-Wei Weng
arXiv:2606. 11211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment.
By Prakul Sunil Hiremath, Harshit R. Hiremath
arXiv:2608. 00422v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent reasoning traces that nevertheless lead to incorrect answers, making response-level uncertainty estimation important for abstention, human review, and adaptive compute allocation.
By Dahai Yu, Lin Jiang, Rongchao Xu, Guang Wang
arXiv:2602.02427v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant breakthroughs across various domains, but they can still produce unreliable or misleading ou...
By Qihao Wen, Jiahao Wang, Yang Nan, Pengfei He, Ravi Tandon, Han Xu