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There has been much recent interest in evaluating large language models for uncertainty calibration to facilitate model control and modulate user trust. Inference time uncertainty, which may provide a real-time signal to the model or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Kyle Moore , Jesse Roberts , Daryl Watson

In safety-critical applications, language models should be able to characterize their uncertainty with meaningful probabilities. Many uncertainty quantification approaches require supervised data; however, finding suitable unseen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sophia Hager , Simon Zeng , Nicholas Andrews

Confidence-weighted routing, selective abstention, and ensemble weighting all assume that a model's stated confidence is informative about its capability on the question being asked. They presume functional metacognition, the capacity to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 M. Moran , Mark Whiting

Verbal confidence elicitation is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from LLMs. We tested whether seven instruction-tuned open-weight models (3-9B parameters, four families) produce verbalised confidence that meets minimal validity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Jon-Paul Cacioli

Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack meaningful confidence estimates for their outputs. While base LLMs are known to exhibit next-token calibration, it remains unclear whether they can assess confidence in the actual meaning of their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Preetum Nakkiran , Arwen Bradley , Adam Goliński , Eugene Ndiaye , Michael Kirchhof , Sinead Williamson

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

In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models in such domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Ting-En Lin , Ang Lv , Yuchuan Wu , Xin Gao , Ji-Rong Wen , Rui Yan , Yongbin Li

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) on language modeling and emergent capabilities make them a promising reference-free evaluator of natural language generation quality, and a competent alternative to human evaluation.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Yuxuan Liu , Tianchi Yang , Shaohan Huang , Zihan Zhang , Haizhen Huang , Furu Wei , Weiwei Deng , Feng Sun , Qi Zhang

Human users increasingly communicate with large language models (LLMs), but LLMs suffer from frequent overconfidence in their output, even when its accuracy is questionable, which undermines their trustworthiness and perceived legitimacy.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Dennis Ulmer , Alexandra Lorson , Ivan Titov , Christian Hardmeier

Large language models (LLMs) are systematically overconfident: they routinely express high certainty on questions they often answer incorrectly. Existing calibration methods either require labeled validation data, degrade under distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Mohamed Rissal Hedna , Jan Strich , Martin Semmann , Chris Biemann

Language model calibration refers to the alignment between the confidence of the model and the actual performance of its responses. While previous studies point out the overconfidence phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) and show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Jixuan Leng , Chengsong Huang , Banghua Zhu , Jiaxin Huang

Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as general-purpose problem solvers, making accurate confidence estimation critical for reliable use. Prior work on LLM calibration largely focuses on response-level confidence, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Sin-Han Yang , Cheng-Kuang Wu , Chieh-Yen Lin , Yun-Nung Chen , Hung-yi Lee , Shao-Hua Sun

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities, enabling concise, context-aware answers in question answering (QA) tasks. The lack of transparency in complex LLMs has inspired extensive research aimed at developing methods to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yangyi Li , Mengdi Huai

Randomized experiments or randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are gold standards for causal inference, yet cost and sample-size constraints limit power. We introduce CALM (Causal Analysis leveraging Language Models), a statistical framework…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-09 Xinrui Ruan , Xinwei Ma , Yingfei Wang , Waverly Wei , Jingshen Wang

Calibrating language models (LMs) aligns their generation confidence with the actual likelihood of answer correctness, which can inform users about LMs' reliability and mitigate hallucinated content. However, prior calibration methods, such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Xin Liu , Farima Fatahi Bayat , Lu Wang

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in critical decision-making systems, the lack of reliable methods to measure their uncertainty presents a fundamental trustworthiness risk. We introduce a normalized confidence score…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Xie Xiaohu , Liu Xiaohu , Yao Benjamin

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to automatically label and analyze educational dialogue at scale, yet current pipelines lack reliable ways to detect when models are wrong. We investigate whether reasoning generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Bakhtawar Ahtisham , Kirk Vanacore , Zhuqian Zhou , Jinsook Lee , Rene F. Kizilcec

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multi-turn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tianyi Zhou , Johanne Medina , Sanjay Chawla

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Rosie Zhao , Anshul Shah , Xiaoyu Zhu , Xinke Deng , Zhongyu Jiang , Yang Yang , Joerg Liebelt , Arnab Mondal

Verbalized confidence, in which LLMs report a numerical certainty score, is widely used to estimate uncertainty in black-box settings, yet the confidence scale itself (typically 0--100) is rarely examined. We show that this design choice is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Yuyang Dai