English

Entropy Sentinel: Continuous LLM Accuracy Monitoring from Decoding Entropy Traces in STEM

Computation and Language 2026-05-27 v4

Abstract

Deploying LLMs raises two coupled challenges: (1) monitoring--estimating where a model underperforms as traffic and domains drift--and (2) improvement--prioritizing data acquisition to close the largest performance gaps. We test whether an inference-time signal can estimate slice-level accuracy under domain shift. For each response, we compute an output-entropy profile from final-layer next-token probabilities (from top-kk logprobs) and summarize it with different statistics. A lightweight classifier predicts instance correctness, and averaging predicted probabilities yields a domain-level accuracy estimate. We evaluate on ten STEM reasoning benchmarks with exhaustive train/test compositions (k{1,2,3,4}k\in\{1,2,3,4\}; all (10k)\binom{10}{k} combinations), on different classifier models and features across nine LLMs from six families (3B--20B). Estimates often track held-out benchmark accuracy, and several models show near-monotonic ordering of domains, providing evidence for output-entropy profiles being an accessible signal for scalable monitoring and for targeted data acquisition.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.09001,
  title  = {Entropy Sentinel: Continuous LLM Accuracy Monitoring from Decoding Entropy Traces in STEM},
  author = {Pedro Memoli Buffa and Luciano Del Corro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09001},
  year   = {2026}
}