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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…
Uncertainty calibration is essential for the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly when users rely on verbalized confidence estimates. While prior work has focused on classifiers or short-form generation, confidence…
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…
The rise of large language models (LLMs) and their tight integration into our daily life make it essential to dedicate efforts towards their trustworthiness. Uncertainty quantification for LLMs can establish more human trust into their…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…
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…
Clinical personality assessment screens response validity before interpreting substantive scales. LLM evaluation does not. We apply the validity scaling framework from the PAI and MMPI-3 to metacognitive probe data from 20 frontier models…
With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to various domains, concerns regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs in safety-critical scenarios have been raised, due to their unpredictable tendency to hallucinate and…
Large language models (LLMs) are stochastic, and not all models give deterministic answers, even when setting temperature to zero with a fixed random seed. However, few benchmark studies attempt to quantify uncertainty, partly due to the…
The possibility of LLM self-awareness and even sentience is gaining increasing public attention and has major safety and policy implications, but the science of measuring them is still in a nascent state. Here we introduce a novel…
Recently, overconfidence in large language models (LLMs) has garnered considerable attention due to its fundamental importance in quantifying the trustworthiness of LLM generation. However, existing approaches prompt the \textit{black box…
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…
There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it…
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.…
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…
Automated scoring of student work at scale requires balancing accuracy against cost and latency. In "cascade" systems, small language models (LMs) handle easier scoring tasks while escalating harder ones to larger LMs -- but the challenge…
The Metacognitive Probe is an exploratory five-task, 15-slot diagnostic that decomposes an LLM's confidence behaviour into five behaviourally-distinct dimensions: confidence calibration (T1-CC), epistemic vigilance (T2-EV), knowledge…
LLM confidence calibration is often evaluated by comparing two signals: token-probability scores and verbalized confidence. These signals are sometimes treated as direct readouts of model uncertainty, but their comparison depends on…
Language models (LMs) should provide reliable confidence estimates to help users detect mistakes in their outputs and defer to human experts when necessary. Asking a language model to assess its confidence ("Score your confidence from…