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Related papers: Verbalized Confidence Triggers Self-Verification: …

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Long chains of thought (CoT) from current language models frequently contain logical gaps and unjustified leaps, limiting the gains from additional test-time compute. Improving reasoning quality directly would require process reward models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingchu Gai , Guanning Zeng , Christina Baek , Chen Wu , J. Zico Kolter , Andrej Risteski , Aditi Raghunathan

Uncertainty estimation is a significant issue for current large language models (LLMs) that are generally poorly calibrated and over-confident, especially with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Unlike humans, whose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Ruixin Yang , Dheeraj Rajagopal , Shirley Anugrah Hayati , Bin Hu , Dongyeop Kang

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for factual question-answering, it becomes more important for LLMs to have the capability to communicate the likelihood that their answer is correct. For these verbalized expressions of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Sophia Hager , David Mueller , Kevin Duh , Nicholas Andrews

Despite significant advancements in the general capability of large language models (LLMs), they continue to struggle with consistent and accurate reasoning, especially in complex tasks such as mathematical and code reasoning. One key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zhenwen Liang , Ye Liu , Tong Niu , Xiangliang Zhang , Yingbo Zhou , Semih Yavuz

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performances in various tasks. However, fine-tuning an LLM requires extensive supervision. Human, on the other hand, may improve their reasoning abilities by self-thinking without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Jiaxin Huang , Shixiang Shane Gu , Le Hou , Yuexin Wu , Xuezhi Wang , Hongkun Yu , Jiawei Han

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as science, law, and healthcare, where accurate expressions of uncertainty are essential for reliability and trust. However, current LLMs are often observed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Yibo Li , Miao Xiong , Jiaying Wu , Bryan Hooi

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for automated grading, but their outputs can be unreliable. Rather than improving grading accuracy directly, we address a complementary problem: \textit{predicting when an LLM grader is likely to be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Robinson Ferrer , Damla Turgut , Zhongzhou Chen , Shashank Sonkar

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a common technique for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extended reasoning is often unnecessary and substantially increases token usage. As such, a key question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks by leveraging increased test-time computation and exhibiting behaviors reminiscent of human-like self-reflection. While LRMs show a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Qingcheng Zeng , Weihao Xuan , Leyang Cui , Rob Voigt

Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation. However, as LMs often generate incorrect or hallucinated responses, it is crucial to correctly quantify their uncertainty in responding to given inputs.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Xinmeng Huang , Shuo Li , Mengxin Yu , Matteo Sesia , Hamed Hassani , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani , Edgar Dobriban

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

We show that a GPT-3 model can learn to express uncertainty about its own answers in natural language -- without use of model logits. When given a question, the model generates both an answer and a level of confidence (e.g. "90% confidence"…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Stephanie Lin , Jacob Hilton , Owain Evans

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have predominantly focused on enhancing visual perception to improve accuracy. However, a critical question remains unexplored: Do models know when they do not know? Through a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yuetian Du , Yucheng Wang , Rongyu Zhang , Zhijie Xu , Boyu Yang , Ming Kong , Jie Liu , Qiang Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fuxiang Zhang , Jiacheng Xu , Chaojie Wang , Ce Cui , Yang Liu , Bo An

Self-correction has emerged as a promising solution to boost the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), where LLMs refine their solutions using self-generated critiques that pinpoint the errors. This work explores whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yunxiang Zhang , Muhammad Khalifa , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Jaekyeom Kim , Moontae Lee , Honglak Lee , Lu Wang

A critical component in the trustworthiness of LLMs is reliable uncertainty communication, yet LLMs often use assertive language when conveying false claims, leading to over-reliance and eroded trust. We present the first systematic study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu , Gal Yona , Avi Caciularu , Idan Szpektor , Tim G. J. Rudner , Arman Cohan

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) may fail in giving reliable estimates of their predictive uncertainty. We take a close look into this problem, aiming to answer two questions: (1) Do PLMs learn to become calibrated in the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yangyi Chen , Lifan Yuan , Ganqu Cui , Zhiyuan Liu , Heng Ji

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) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning…