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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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Lihu Chen , Alexandre Perez-Lebel , Fabian M. Suchanek , Gaël Varoquaux

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) may fail in giving reliable estimates of their predictive uncertainty. We take a close look into this problem, aiming to answer two questions: (1) Do PLMs learn to become calibrated in the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yangyi Chen , Lifan Yuan , Ganqu Cui , Zhiyuan Liu , Heng Ji

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks by leveraging increased test-time computation and exhibiting behaviors reminiscent of human-like self-reflection. While LRMs show a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Qingcheng Zeng , Weihao Xuan , Leyang Cui , Rob Voigt

Large Language Models (LLMs) are able to improve their responses when instructed to do so, a capability known as self-correction. When instructions provide only the task's goal without specific details about potential issues in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Guangliang Liu , Haitao Mao , Bochuan Cao , Zhiyu Xue , Xitong Zhang , Rongrong Wang , Jiliang Tang , Kristen Johnson

Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable proficiency in natural language tasks, yet their frequent overconfidence-misalignment between predicted confidence and true correctness-poses significant risks in critical decision-making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Prateek Chhikara

As Large Language Models become integral to decision-making, optimism about their power is tempered with concern over their errors. Users may over-rely on LLM advice that is confidently stated but wrong, or under-rely due to mistrust.…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Jessica Y. Bo , Sophia Wan , Ashton Anderson

Human users increasingly communicate with large language models (LLMs), but LLMs suffer from frequent overconfidence in their output, even when its accuracy is questionable, which undermines their trustworthiness and perceived legitimacy.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Dennis Ulmer , Alexandra Lorson , Ivan Titov , Christian Hardmeier

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Jiahui Geng , Fengyu Cai , Yuxia Wang , Heinz Koeppl , Preslav Nakov , Iryna Gurevych

Calibrated confidence estimates are necessary for large language model (LLM) outputs to be trusted by human users. While LLMs can express their confidence in human-interpretable ways, verbalized LLM-generated confidence scores have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Victor Wang , Elias Stengel-Eskin

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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at numerical estimation but struggle to correctly quantify uncertainty. We study how well LLMs construct confidence intervals around their own answers and find that they are systematically overconfident.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-03 Elliot L. Epstein , John Winnicki , Thanawat Sornwanee , Rajat Dwaraknath

Language model calibration refers to the alignment between the confidence of the model and the actual performance of its responses. While previous studies point out the overconfidence phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) and show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Jixuan Leng , Chengsong Huang , Banghua Zhu , Jiaxin Huang

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in natural language processing, but their underlying mechanisms are often misunderstood. Despite exhibiting coherent answers and apparent reasoning behaviors, LLMs rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Bo Zhou , Daniel Geißler , Paul Lukowicz

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Moxin Li , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng , Fengbin Zhu , Qifan Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), become increasingly integrated into decision-making processes, the ability to trust their outputs is crucial. To earn human trust, LLMs must be well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Mark Steyvers , Heliodoro Tejeda , Aakriti Kumar , Catarina Belem , Sheer Karny , Xinyue Hu , Lukas Mayer , Padhraic Smyth

Large language models can detect their own errors and sometimes correct them without external feedback, but the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. We investigate this through the lens of second-order models of confidence from decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Dharshan Kumaran , Viorica Patraucean , Simon Osindero , Petar Veličković , Nathaniel Daw