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Differentiable Conformal Training for LLM Reasoning Factuality

Machine Learning 2026-04-23 v1

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate, limiting their reliability in critical applications. Conformal Prediction (CP) addresses this by calibrating error rates on held-out data to provide statistically valid confidence guarantees. Recent work extends CP to LLM factuality to filter out risky claims, ensuring that hallucination rates remain below a user-specified level (e.g., 10%). While prior methods treat claims independently, Coherent Factuality extends to multi-step reasoning by representing outputs as dependency graphs and jointly validating claims with their logical ancestors. A key limitation is that Coherent Factuality is not differentiable, requiring hand-crafted scorers that at high reliability levels remove nearly 60% of true claims. We introduce Differentiable Coherent Factuality (DCF), a fully differentiable relaxation that enables learning improved scorers while provably recovering the original algorithm's guarantees. Experiments on two benchmark reasoning datasets demonstrate DCF achieves up to 141% improvement in claim retention while maintaining reliability guarantees, representing a significant step towards reliable conformal LLM systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.20098,
  title  = {Differentiable Conformal Training for LLM Reasoning Factuality},
  author = {Nathan Hittesdorf and Marco Salzetta and Lu Cheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.20098},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Submitted ICML

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:29:34.788Z