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Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident yet incorrect answers, which can lead to risky failures in real-world applications. We study whether post-training can make a model's self-assessment explicit: when the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Junyu Guo , Shangding Gu , Ming Jin , Costas Spanos , Javad Lavaei

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), become increasingly integrated into decision-making processes, the ability to trust their outputs is crucial. To earn human trust, LLMs must be well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Mark Steyvers , Heliodoro Tejeda , Aakriti Kumar , Catarina Belem , Sheer Karny , Xinyue Hu , Lukas Mayer , Padhraic Smyth

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to have difficulty knowing they do not possess certain knowledge and tend to provide specious answers in such cases. Retrieval Augmentation (RA) has been extensively studied to mitigate LLMs'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Shiyu Ni , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo , Xueqi Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate or fabricated information and generally fail to indicate their confidence, which limits their broader applications. Previous work elicits confidence from LLMs by direct or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Tianyang Xu , Shujin Wu , Shizhe Diao , Xiaoze Liu , Xingyao Wang , Yangyi Chen , Jing Gao

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various reasoning tasks, aided by techniques like chain-of-thought prompting that elicits verbalized reasoning. However, LLMs often generate text with obvious…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Zhihui Xie , Jizhou Guo , Tong Yu , Shuai Li

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where the available context is incomplete or degraded. We argue that an LLM generating answers under incomplete context can be viewed as an implicit imputer, and evaluated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-14 Stef van Buuren

Large language models (LLMs) have been found to produce hallucinations when the question exceeds their internal knowledge boundaries. A reliable model should have a clear perception of its knowledge boundaries, providing correct answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Shiyu Ni , Keping Bi , Lulu Yu , Jiafeng Guo

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly optimized for long reasoning, under the assumption that more reasoning leads to better performance. However, emerging evidence suggests that longer responses can sometimes degrade accuracy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Jinyan Su , Jennifer Healey , Preslav Nakov , Claire Cardie

To enhance Large Language Models' (LLMs) reliability, calibration is essential -- the model's assessed confidence scores should align with the actual likelihood of its responses being correct. However, current confidence elicitation methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yukun Huang , Yixin Liu , Raghuveer Thirukovalluru , Arman Cohan , Bhuwan Dhingra

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance in semantic understanding and generation, yet accurately assessing their output reliability remains a significant challenge. While numerous studies have explored calibration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Liangru Xie , Hui Liu , Jingying Zeng , Xianfeng Tang , Yan Han , Chen Luo , Jing Huang , Zhen Li , Suhang Wang , Qi He

Verbal confidence -- prompting LLMs to state their confidence as a number or category -- is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from black-box models. However, how LLMs internally generate such scores remains unknown. We address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Dharshan Kumaran , Arthur Conmy , Federico Barbero , Simon Osindero , Viorica Patraucean , Petar Veličković

Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucinations, posing significant challenges for real-world applications. Confidence calibration, as an effective indicator of hallucination, is thus essential to enhance the trustworthiness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Caiqi Zhang , Ruihan Yang , Zhisong Zhang , Xinting Huang , Sen Yang , Dong Yu , Nigel Collier

Large Language Models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and LLaMA, are susceptible to generating hallucinated answers in a confident tone. While efforts to elicit and calibrate confidence scores have proven useful, recent findings show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Lihu Chen , Alexandre Perez-Lebel , Fabian M. Suchanek , Gaël Varoquaux

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks requiring a single correct answer, but they perform poorly in multi-solution tasks that require generating comprehensive and diverse answers. We attribute this limitation to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jiannan Guan , Qiguang Chen , Libo Qin , Dengyun Peng , Jinhao Liu , Liangyu Huo , Jian Xie , Wanxiang Che

Self-improvement is a mechanism in Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, post-training and test-time inference. We explore a framework where the model verifies its own outputs, filters or reweights data based on this verification, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Yuda Song , Hanlin Zhang , Carson Eisenach , Sham Kakade , Dean Foster , Udaya Ghai

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in settings where reliable self-assessment is critical. Assessing model reliability has evolved from using probabilistic correctness estimates to, more recently, eliciting verbalized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Sree Bhattacharyya , Samarth Khanna , Leona Chen , Lucas Craig , Tharun Dilliraj , James Z. Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown success in generating high-quality responses. In order to achieve better alignment with LLMs with human preference, various works are proposed based on specific optimization process, which, however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Zhuo Li , Yuhao Du , Jinpeng Hu , Xiang Wan , Anningzhe Gao

Language and Vision-Language Models (LLMs/VLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI by their ability to generate human-like text and understand images, but ensuring their reliability is crucial. This paper aims to evaluate the ability of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Tobias Groot , Matias Valdenegro-Toro

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu