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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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI-based tutoring systems. Can they faithfully model novice reasoning and metacognitive judgments? Existing evaluations emphasize problem-solving accuracy, overlooking the fragmented…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Conrad Borchers , Jill-Jênn Vie , Roger Azevedo

To maintain user trust, large language models (LLMs) should signal low confidence on examples where they are incorrect, instead of misleading the user. The standard approach of estimating confidence is to use the softmax probabilities of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Vaishnavi Shrivastava , Percy Liang , Ananya Kumar

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) have revolutionized inference across diverse natural language tasks, with larger models performing better but at higher computational costs. We propose a confidence-driven strategy that dynamically selects the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Bo-Wei Chen , Chung-Chi Chen , An-Zi Yen

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have predominantly focused on enhancing visual perception to improve accuracy. However, a critical question remains unexplored: Do models know when they do not know? Through a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yuetian Du , Yucheng Wang , Rongyu Zhang , Zhijie Xu , Boyu Yang , Ming Kong , Jie Liu , Qiang Zhu

Generative AI increasingly supports educational design tasks, e.g., through Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrating the capability to design assessment questions that are aligned with pedagogical frameworks (e.g., Bloom's taxonomy).…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Chris Davis Jaldi , Anmol Saini , Shan Zhang , Noah Schroeder , Cogan Shimizu , Eleni Ilkou

Long chains of thought (CoT) from current language models frequently contain logical gaps and unjustified leaps, limiting the gains from additional test-time compute. Improving reasoning quality directly would require process reward models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingchu Gai , Guanning Zeng , Christina Baek , Chen Wu , J. Zico Kolter , Andrej Risteski , Aditi Raghunathan

Confidence calibration is essential for making large language models (LLMs) reliable, yet existing training-free methods have been primarily studied under single-answer question answering. In this paper, we show that these methods break…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yuhan Wang , Shiyu Ni , Zhikai Ding , Zihang Zhan , Yuanzi Li , Keping Bi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have acquired ubiquitous attention for their performances across diverse domains. Our study here searches through LLMs' cognitive abilities and confidence dynamics. We dive deep into understanding the alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Aniket Kumar Singh , Suman Devkota , Bishal Lamichhane , Uttam Dhakal , Chandra Dhakal

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Jiawei Wang , Yanfei Zhou , Siddartha Devic , Deqing Fu

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, accurately assessing their confidence is crucial. Humans typically express confidence through epistemic markers (e.g., "fairly confident") instead of numerical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jiayu Liu , Qing Zong , Weiqi Wang , Yangqiu Song

LLM cascades deploy small LLMs to answer most queries, limiting the use of large and expensive LLMs to difficult queries. This approach can significantly reduce costs without impacting performance. However, risk-sensitive domains such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Michael J. Zellinger , Rex Liu , Matt Thomson

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong average performance yet remain unreliable at the instance level, with frequent hallucinations, brittle failures, and poorly calibrated confidence. We study reliability through the lens of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pranav Kallem

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic and multi-turn workflows where they are tasked to perform actions of significant consequence. In order to deploy them reliably and manage risky outcomes in these settings, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Arka Pal , Teo Kitanovski , Arthur Liang , Akilesh Potti , Micah Goldblum

Verbalized confidence, in which LLMs report a numerical certainty score, is widely used to estimate uncertainty in black-box settings, yet the confidence scale itself (typically 0--100) is rarely examined. We show that this design choice is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Yuyang Dai

Do all instances need inference through the big models for a correct prediction? Perhaps not; some instances are easy and can be answered correctly by even small capacity models. This provides opportunities for improving the computational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Neeraj Varshney , Chitta Baral

Researchers and practitioners operating on a limited budget face the cost-performance trade-off dilemma. The challenging decision often centers on whether to use a large LLM with better performance or a smaller one with reduced costs. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Guillem Ramírez , Alexandra Birch , Ivan Titov

We present a principled approach to provide LLM-based evaluation with a rigorous guarantee of human agreement. We first propose that a reliable evaluation method should not uncritically rely on model preferences for pairwise evaluation, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Jaehun Jung , Faeze Brahman , Yejin Choi

Self-consistency decoding enhances LLMs' performance on reasoning tasks by sampling diverse reasoning paths and selecting the most frequent answer. However, it is computationally expensive, as sampling many of these (lengthy) paths is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Amir Taubenfeld , Tom Sheffer , Eran Ofek , Amir Feder , Ariel Goldstein , Zorik Gekhman , Gal Yona