English

ADVICE: Answer-Dependent Verbalized Confidence Estimation

Computation and Language 2026-05-04 v3

Abstract

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled them to communicate their confidence in natural language, improving transparency and reliability. However, this expressiveness is often accompanied by systematic overconfidence, whose underlying causes remain poorly understood. In this work, we analyze the dynamics of verbalized confidence estimation and identify answer-independence -- the failure to condition confidence on the model's own answer -- as a primary driver of this behavior. To address this, we introduce ADVICE (Answer-Dependent Verbalized Confidence Estimation), a fine-tuning framework that promotes answer-grounded confidence estimation. Extensive experiments show that ADVICE substantially improves confidence calibration, while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen settings without degrading task performance. We further demonstrate that these gains stem from enhanced answer dependence, shedding light on the origins of overconfidence and enabling trustworthy confidence verbalization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.10913,
  title  = {ADVICE: Answer-Dependent Verbalized Confidence Estimation},
  author = {Ki Jung Seo and Sehun Lim and Taeuk Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10913},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

ACL 2026 Main

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:32:52.990Z