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Related papers: LLMs Should Express Uncertainty Explicitly

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A safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an accurate expression of confidence in their answers. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach that allows to directly fine-tune LLMs to express calibrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 David Bani-Harouni , Chantal Pellegrini , Paul Stangel , Ege Özsoy , Kamilia Zaripova , Nassir Navab , Matthias Keicher

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Sree Bhattacharyya , Samarth Khanna , Leona Chen , Lucas Craig , Tharun Dilliraj , James Z. Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the ability to perform tasks in the field of code generation. However, there is still a gap between LLMs being capable coders and being top-tier software engineers. Based on the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Jie JW Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to automatically label and analyze educational dialogue at scale, yet current pipelines lack reliable ways to detect when models are wrong. We investigate whether reasoning generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Bakhtawar Ahtisham , Kirk Vanacore , Zhuqian Zhou , Jinsook Lee , Rene F. Kizilcec

Do large language models (LLMs) anticipate when they will answer correctly? To study this, we extract activations after a question is read but before any tokens are generated, and train linear probes to predict whether the model's…

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative abilities, but can they judge the quality of their own generations? A popular concept, referred to as self-refinement, postulates that LLMs can detect and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Kumar Shridhar , Koustuv Sinha , Andrew Cohen , Tianlu Wang , Ping Yu , Ram Pasunuru , Mrinmaya Sachan , Jason Weston , Asli Celikyilmaz

Despite demonstrating impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) still often struggle to accurately express the factual knowledge they possess, especially in cases where the LLMs' knowledge boundaries are ambiguous. To improve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Boyang Xue , Fei Mi , Qi Zhu , Hongru Wang , Rui Wang , Sheng Wang , Erxin Yu , Xuming Hu , Kam-Fai Wong

Large language models (LLMs) often miscommunicate their uncertainty: repeated queries can produce divergent answers, yet generated responses are typically unhedged or hedged in ways that do not reflect this variability. This conveys…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Bryan Eikema , Evgenia Ilia , José G. C. de Souza , Chrysoula Zerva , Wilker Aziz

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with thinking traces have shown strong performance on English reasoning tasks. However, their ability to think in other languages is less studied. This capability is as important as answer accuracy for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Jirui Qi , Shan Chen , Zidi Xiong , Raquel Fernández , Danielle S. Bitterman , Arianna Bisazza

We explore uncertainty quantification in large language models (LLMs), with the goal to identify when uncertainty in responses given a query is large. We simultaneously consider both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, where the former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Yasin Abbasi Yadkori , Ilja Kuzborskij , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Adil Bahaj , Hamed Rahimi , Mohamed Chetouani , Mounir Ghogho

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted for high-stakes life advice, yet they lack standard safeguards against providing confident but misguided responses. This creates risks of sycophancy and over-confidence. This paper…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Joshua Adrian Cahyono , Saran Subramanian

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Diego Calanzone , Stefano Teso , Antonio Vergari

Honesty is a fundamental principle for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring these models to recognize what they know and don't know and be able to faithfully express their knowledge. Despite promising, current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Siheng Li , Cheng Yang , Taiqiang Wu , Chufan Shi , Yuji Zhang , Xinyu Zhu , Zesen Cheng , Deng Cai , Mo Yu , Lemao Liu , Jie Zhou , Yujiu Yang , Ngai Wong , Xixin Wu , Wai Lam

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performances in various tasks. However, fine-tuning an LLM requires extensive supervision. Human, on the other hand, may improve their reasoning abilities by self-thinking without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Jiaxin Huang , Shixiang Shane Gu , Le Hou , Yuexin Wu , Xuezhi Wang , Hongkun Yu , Jiawei Han

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

Widely deployed large language models (LLMs) can produce convincing yet incorrect outputs, potentially misleading users who may rely on them as if they were correct. To reduce such overreliance, there have been calls for LLMs to communicate…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Sunnie S. Y. Kim , Q. Vera Liao , Mihaela Vorvoreanu , Stephanie Ballard , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Chen Li , Xiaoling Hu , Songzhu Zheng , Jiawei Zhou , Chao Chen

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