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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

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate superior reasoning capabilities compared to small language models (SLMs), but incur substantially higher costs. We propose COllaborative REAsoner (COREA), a system that cascades an SLM with an LLM to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Chuang Zhang , Zizhen Zhu , Yihao Wei , Bing Tian , Junyi Liu , Henan Wang , Xavier Wang , Yaxiao Liu

We propose a method for confidence estimation in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that aligns closely with the correctness of large language model (LLM) outputs. Confidence estimation is especially critical in high-stakes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Zhiqi Huang , Vivek Datla , Chenyang Zhu , Alfy Samuel , Daben Liu , Anoop Kumar , Ritesh Soni

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strikingly conflicting behaviors: they can appear steadfastly overconfident in their initial answers whilst at the same time being prone to excessive doubt when challenged. To investigate this apparent…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various downstream tasks, but they may generate inaccurate or false information with a confident tone. One of the possible solutions is to empower the LLM confidence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Haixia Han , Tingyun Li , Shisong Chen , Jie Shi , Chengyu Du , Yanghua Xiao , Jiaqing Liang , Xin Lin

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) develop cross-lingual abilities despite being trained on limited parallel data. However, they often struggle to generate responses in the intended language, favoring high-resource languages such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Elnaz Rahmati , Alireza S. Ziabari , Morteza Dehghani

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex tasks that require extended reasoning. In such settings, models often benefit from diverse chains-of-thought to arrive at multiple candidate solutions. This requires two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Xueyan Li , Guinan Su , Mrinmaya Sachan , Jonas Geiping

Understanding how large language models (LLMs) acquire, retain, and apply knowledge remains an open challenge. This paper introduces a novel framework, K-(CSA)^2, which categorizes LLM knowledge along two dimensions: correctness and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Yanbo Fang , Ruixiang Tang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse tasks but often struggle to accurately gauge their knowledge boundaries, leading to confident yet incorrect responses. This paper explores leveraging LLMs' internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Shiyu Ni , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo , Lulu Yu , Baolong Bi , Xueqi Cheng

Increasing test-time computation is a straightforward approach to enhancing the quality of responses in Large Language Models (LLMs). While Best-of-N sampling and Self-Consistency with majority voting are simple and effective, they require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chengsong Huang , Langlin Huang , Jixuan Leng , Jiacheng Liu , Jiaxin Huang

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) have shown impressive performance by generating reasoning paths before final answers, but learning such a reasoning path requires costly human supervision. To address this issue, recent studies have explored…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Hyosoon Jang , Yunhui Jang , Sungjae Lee , Jungseul Ok , Sungsoo Ahn

Faithful generation in large language models (LLMs) is challenged by knowledge conflicts between parametric memory and external context. Existing contrastive decoding methods tuned specifically to handle conflict often lack adaptability and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Anant Khandelwal , Manish Gupta , Puneet Agrawal

To use generative question-and-answering (QA) systems for decision-making and in any critical application, these systems need to provide well-calibrated confidence scores that reflect the correctness of their answers. Existing calibration…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Putra Manggala , Atalanti Mastakouri , Elke Kirschbaum , Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan , Aaditya Ramdas

Ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks remains a formidable challenge, particularly in scenarios that demand precise mathematical calculations and knowledge-intensive open-domain generation. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ali Razghandi , Seyed Mohammad Hadi Hosseini , Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah

This paper proposes the use of "multicalibration" to yield interpretable and reliable confidence scores for outputs generated by large language models (LLMs). Multicalibration asks for calibration not just marginally, but simultaneously…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-09 Gianluca Detommaso , Martin Bertran , Riccardo Fogliato , Aaron Roth

Prompt optimization algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in multi-step reasoning but still lack effective uncertainty estimation. This paper introduces a benchmark dataset to evaluate uncertainty metrics, focusing on Answer,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Pei-Fu Guo , Yun-Da Tsai , Shou-De Lin

Large language models optimized with techniques like RLHF have achieved good alignment in being helpful and harmless. However, post-alignment, these language models often exhibit overconfidence, where the expressed confidence does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Mozhi Zhang , Mianqiu Huang , Rundong Shi , Linsen Guo , Chong Peng , Peng Yan , Yaqian Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances large language models (LLMs) reasoning but severely suffers from calibration degeneration, where models become excessively over-confident in incorrect answers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhengzhao Ma , Xueru Wen , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Jinglin Yang , Min He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized inference across diverse natural language tasks, with larger models performing better but at higher computational costs. We propose a confidence-driven strategy that dynamically selects the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Bo-Wei Chen , Chung-Chi Chen , An-Zi Yen