English
Related papers

Related papers: How do LLMs Compute Verbal Confidence

200 papers

Autonomous agents based on large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving to handle multi-turn tasks, but ensuring their trustworthiness remains a critical challenge. A fundamental pillar of this trustworthiness is calibration, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Weihao Xuan , Qingcheng Zeng , Heli Qi , Yunze Xiao , Junjue Wang , Naoto Yokoya

We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Gal Yona , Roee Aharoni , Mor Geva

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

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong multimodal reasoning but frequently exhibit hallucinations and incorrect responses with high certainty, which hinders their usage in high-stakes domains. Existing verbalized confidence…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Wenyi Xiao , Xinchi Xu , Leilei Gan

A trustworthy real-world prediction system should produce well-calibrated confidence scores; that is, its confidence in an answer should be indicative of the likelihood that the answer is correct, enabling deferral to an expert in cases of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Katherine Tian , Eric Mitchell , Allan Zhou , Archit Sharma , Rafael Rafailov , Huaxiu Yao , Chelsea Finn , Christopher D. Manning

Large Language Models (LLMs) can correct their self-generated responses, but a decline in accuracy after self-correction is also witnessed. To have a deeper understanding of self-correction, we endeavor to decompose, evaluate, and analyze…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Zhe Yang , Yichang Zhang , Yudong Wang , Ziyao Xu , Junyang Lin , Zhifang Sui

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu , Gal Yona , Avi Caciularu , Idan Szpektor , Tim G. J. Rudner , Arman Cohan

Reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires accurate uncertainty estimation. Existing methods are predominantly answer-first, producing confidence only after generating an answer, which measure the correctness of a specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Changcheng Li , Jiancan Wu , Hengheng Zhang , Zhengsu Chen , Guo An , Junxiang Qiu , Xiang Wang , Qi Tian

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

Despite the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) for code generation, they often output incorrect code. One reason is that model output probabilities are often not well-correlated with correctness, and reflect only the final output…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Francisco Ribeiro , Claudio Spiess , Prem Devanbu , Sarah Nadi

Large Language Models (LLMs) store and retrieve vast amounts of factual knowledge acquired during pre-training. Prior research has localized and identified mechanisms behind knowledge recall; however, it has only focused on English…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Constanza Fierro , Negar Foroutan , Desmond Elliott , Anders Søgaard

Large language models (LLMs) generate not only reasoning text, but also token-level confidence trajectories that record how uncertainty evolves during inference. Whether these trajectories are relevant to reasoning correctness remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shuo Liu , Ding Liu , Shi-Ju Ran

Large language models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate or fabricated information and generally fail to indicate their confidence, which limits their broader applications. Previous work elicits confidence from LLMs by direct or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Tianyang Xu , Shujin Wu , Shizhe Diao , Xiaoze Liu , Xingyao Wang , Yangyi Chen , Jing Gao

Multilingual pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) are incredibly effective at Question Answering (QA), a core task in Natural Language Understanding, achieving high accuracies on several multilingual benchmarks. However, little is known…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Yahan Yang , Soham Dan , Dan Roth , Insup Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly show reasoning rationales alongside their answers, turning "reasoning" into a user-interface element. While step-by-step rationales are typically associated with model performance, how they…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Xin Sun , Shu Wei , Jos A Bosch , Isao Echizen , Saku Sugawara , Abdallah El Ali

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled them to communicate their confidence in natural language, improving transparency and reliability. However, this expressiveness is often accompanied by systematic overconfidence,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Ki Jung Seo , Sehun Lim , Taeuk Kim

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing every aspect of society. They are increasingly used in problem-solving tasks to substitute human assessment and reasoning. LLMs are trained on what humans write and are thus exposed to human…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Fengfei Sun , Ningke Li , Kailong Wang , Lorenz Goette

LLMs' linguistically expressed confidence should faithfully reflect their intrinsic uncertainty. While recent work shows LLMs struggle to use epistemic markers (e.g., "it is likely...") in a human-aligned fashion, it remains unclear whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu , Arman Cohan

Large Language Models (LLMs) that can be deployed locally have recently gained popularity for privacy-sensitive tasks, with companies such as Meta, Google, and Intel playing significant roles in their development. However, the security of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zibo Gao , Junjie Hu , Feng Guo , Yixin Zhang , Yinglong Han , Siyuan Liu , Haiyang Li , Zhiqiang Lv

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in applications requiring factual accuracy, yet their outputs often contain hallucinated responses. While fact-checking can mitigate these errors, existing methods typically retrieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Haoran Wang , Maryam Khalid , Qiong Wu , Jian Gao , Cheng Cao