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The Computational Basis of Confidence in Large Language Models

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Reliable confidence -- the probability that a model's own answer is correct -- is essential for the trustworthy deployment of language models. Existing work has largely evaluated confidence by how well it predicts correctness and whether it is calibrated, leaving open a more fundamental question: what does the confidence signal itself represent?

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arXiv AI
4d ago

Probability is Not Enough: Exploring and Counting Divergent Tokens for Reasoning Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs

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