arXiv AI
Sep 17

Confidence Comes from Experience: Experiential Confidence Estimation from Reasoning to Agents

The paper introduces XConf, an experiential confidence estimator that augments a language model’s current inference with a record of its past graded episodes. By recalling similar past tasks and reflecting on past outcomes, XConf generates confidence scores without accessing logits or updating weights, achieving superior discrimination and calibration across diverse benchmarks. The method demonstrates significant gains in selective prediction, improving success rates on agent tasks by up to 8.7 points.

By Caiqi Zhang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li, Yulong Chen, Dharshan Kumaran, Nigel Collier