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Related papers: Confidence-Based Response Abstinence: Improving LL…

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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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains where errors carry high social, scientific, or safety costs. Yet standard confidence estimators, such as token likelihood, semantic similarity and multi-sample consistency,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Pengyue Yang , Jiawen Wen , Haolin Jin , Linghan Huang , Huaming Chen , Ling Chen

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) often produce confident but incorrect answers in settings where abstention would be safer. Standard evaluation protocols, however, require a response and do not account for how confidence should guide decisions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Sean Wu , Fredrik K. Gustafsson , Edward Phillips , Boyan Gao , Anshul Thakur , David A. Clifton

To maintain user trust, large language models (LLMs) should signal low confidence on examples where they are incorrect, instead of misleading the user. The standard approach of estimating confidence is to use the softmax probabilities of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Vaishnavi Shrivastava , Percy Liang , Ananya Kumar

LLMs are an integral component of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. While many studies focus on evaluating the overall quality of end-to-end RAG systems, there is a gap in understanding the appropriateness of LLMs for the RAG…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Maojia Song , Shang Hong Sim , Rishabh Bhardwaj , Hai Leong Chieu , Navonil Majumder , Soujanya Poria

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge sources, enabling more accurate and contextually relevant responses tailored to user queries. These systems, however, remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Huichi Zhou , Kin-Hei Lee , Zhonghao Zhan , Yue Chen , Zhenhao Li , Zhaoyang Wang , Hamed Haddadi , Emine Yilmaz

A safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an accurate expression of confidence in their answers. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach that allows to directly fine-tune LLMs to express calibrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 David Bani-Harouni , Chantal Pellegrini , Paul Stangel , Ege Özsoy , Kamilia Zaripova , Nassir Navab , Matthias Keicher

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution for mitigating hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) with retrieved external knowledge. Adaptive RAG enhances this approach by enabling dynamic retrieval…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Huanshuo Liu , Hao Zhang , Zhijiang Guo , Jing Wang , Kuicai Dong , Xiangyang Li , Yi Quan Lee , Cong Zhang , Yong Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they face inherent limitations such as constrained parametric knowledge and high retraining costs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Leqian Li , Dianxi Shi , Jialu Zhou , Xinyu Wei , Mingyue Yang , Songchang Jin , Shaowu Yang

Question answering systems (QA) utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily depend on the retrieval component to provide them with domain-specific information and reduce the risk of generating inaccurate responses or hallucinations.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ashkan Alinejad , Krtin Kumar , Ali Vahdat

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a key technique for leveraging external knowledge and reducing hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, RAG still struggles to fully prevent hallucinated responses. To address this, it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Xuzhao Geng , Haozhao Wang , Jun Wang , Wei Liu , Ruixuan Li

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) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet hallucinations in knowledge-intensive tasks remain a critical challenge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) addresses this by integrating external…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Zhipeng Song , Xiangyu Kong , Xinrui Bao , Yizhi Zhou , Jiulong Jiao , Sitong Liu , Yuhang Zhou , Heng Qi

While hallucinations of large language models could been alleviated through retrieval-augmented generation and citation generation, how the model utilizes internal knowledge is still opaque, and the trustworthiness of its generated answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Jiajun Shen , Tong Zhou , Yubo Chen , Delai Qiu , Shengping Liu , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Uncertainty estimation is important for deploying LLMs in high-stakes applications such as healthcare and finance, where hallucinations can appear fluent and plausible while being factually incorrect, making it difficult for users to judge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingcheng Zhu , Yu Liu , Tingting Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are employed across various high-stakes domains, where the reliability of their outputs is crucial. One commonly used method to assess the reliability of LLMs' responses is uncertainty estimation, which gauges…

We introduce a group of related methods for binary classification tasks using probes of the hidden state activations in large language models (LLMs). Performance is on par with the largest and most advanced LLMs currently available, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 John Scoville , Shang Gao , Devanshu Agrawal , Javed Qadrud-Din

Empowering large language models to accurately express confidence in their answers is essential for trustworthy decision-making. Previous confidence elicitation methods, which primarily rely on white-box access to internal model information…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Miao Xiong , Zhiyuan Hu , Xinyang Lu , Yifei Li , Jie Fu , Junxian He , Bryan Hooi

The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach is used to reduce the confabulation of large language models (LLMs) for question answering by retrieving and providing additional context coming from external knowledge sources (e.g., by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Alexander Bondarenko , Adrian Viehweger