Related papers: How do LLMs Compute Verbal Confidence
Large language models (LLMs) often produce answers with high certainty even when they are incorrect, making reliable confidence estimation essential for deployment in real-world scenarios. Verbalized confidence, where models explicitly…
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…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce surprisingly sophisticated estimates of their own uncertainty. However, it remains unclear to what extent this expressed confidence is tied to the reasoning, knowledge, or decision making of the…
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…
Metacognition -- assessing the quality of one's own cognitive performance -- guides adaptive behavior across species. Substantial research demonstrates that confidence signals can be extracted from language model outputs, yet a fundamental…
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…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to produce very high-quality tests and responses to our queries. But how much can we trust this generated text? In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty quantification in LLMs. We propose a…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often display overconfidence, presenting information with unwarranted certainty in high-stakes contexts. We investigate the internal basis of this behavior via mechanistic interpretability. Using open-sourced…
We investigate the calibration of large language models' (LLMs') confidence across diverse tasks. The results of our preregistered study show that the current crop of LLMs are, like people, too sure they are right: confidence exceeds…
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…
Self-detection for Large Language Models (LLMs) seeks to evaluate the trustworthiness of the LLM's output by leveraging its own capabilities, thereby alleviating the issue of output hallucination. However, existing self-detection approaches…
Estimating uncertainty or confidence in the responses of a model can be significant in evaluating trust not only in the responses, but also in the model as a whole. In this paper, we explore the problem of estimating confidence for…
Robust verbal confidence generated by large language models (LLMs) is crucial for the deployment of LLMs to help ensure transparency, trust, and safety in many applications, including those involving human-AI interactions. In this paper, we…
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…
In many high-risk machine learning applications it is essential for a model to indicate when it is uncertain about a prediction. While large language models (LLMs) can reach and even surpass human-level accuracy on a variety of benchmarks,…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks in various domains. Despite their impressive performance, they can be unreliable due to factual errors in their generations. Assessing their…
Large Language Models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and LLaMA, are susceptible to generating hallucinated answers in a confident tone. While efforts to elicit and calibrate confidence scores have proven useful, recent findings show that…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as powerful tools for several high-stakes natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recent prompting works claim to elicit intermediate reasoning steps and key tokens that serve as…