Papers with confidence estimation
Revisiting Epistemic Markers in Confidence Estimation: Can Markers Accurately Reflect Large Language Models’ Uncertainty? (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, but their confidence is inconsistent in out-of-distribution scenarios. |
| Approach: | They define "marker confidence" as the observed accuracy when a model employs an epistemic marker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalizes well within the same distribution, but its confidence is inconsistent in out-of-distribution scenarios. |
MAC-Tuning: LLM Multi-Compositional Problem Reasoning with Enhanced Knowledge Boundary Awareness (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models produce non-existing facts when faced with questions outside their parametric knowledge, which undermines their reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that separates the learning of answer prediction and confidence estimation during fine-tuning on instruction data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple models and different model sizes show that the proposed method outperforms baselines by up to 25% in average precision. |
Multi-CLS BERT: An Efficient Alternative to Traditional Ensembling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ensembling BERT models often improves accuracy but at the cost of significantly more computation and memory footprint. |
| Approach: | They propose a new ensembling method for CLS-based prediction tasks that is almost as efficient as a single BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing BERT models on GLUE and SuperGLUE with 100 training samples. |
Confidence Modeling for Neural Semantic Parsing (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that neural semantic parsers are difficult to interpret due to their complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use confidence models to estimate predictions for neural semantic parsers . they outline three major causes of uncertainty and use metrics to quantify them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a widely used method that relies on posterior probability and improves interpretation quality. |
The Art of Abstention: Selective Prediction and Error Regularization for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have improved the state-of-the-art results on many NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple error regularization trick that improves confidence estimation without substantially increasing the computation budget. |
| Outcome: | The proposed regularization improves confidence estimation without increasing computation budget. |
Calibrating Zero-shot Cross-lingual (Un-)structured Predictions (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing need for model calibration when natural language models are deployed in critical tasks. |
| Approach: | They compare model calibration methods in a context of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer with pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fails to calibrate more complex confidence estimations in structured predictions compared to expressive alternatives like Gaussian Process Calibration. |
Influences on LLM Calibration: A Study of Response Agreement, Loss Functions, and Prompt Styles (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies neglect to measure the generalization of their methods to other prompt styles and different sizes of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains an auxiliary model for confidence estimation that aggregates responses from multiple LLMs to capture inter-model agreement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates response agreement and focal loss with binary cross-entropy to improve calibration from baselines. |
Can NLI Models Verify QA Systems’ Predictions? (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent question answering systems perform well on benchmark datasets, but are not always well-calibrated to spot spurious answers under distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language inference to verify whether answers are correct . they leverage large pre-trained models and recent prior datasets to construct powerful question conversion and decontextualization modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the confidence estimation of a QA model across different domains, evaluated in a selective QA setting. |
Calibrating LLM Confidence by Probing Perturbed Representation Stability (2025.emnlp-main)
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Reza Khanmohammadi, Erfan Miahi, Mehrsa Mardikoraem, Simerjot Kaur, Ivan Brugere, Charese Smiley, Kundan S Thind, Mohammad M. Ghassemi
| Challenge: | Despite their impressive performance, large language models (LLMs) consistently struggle with confidence calibration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze internal representational stability in large language models by applying adversarial perturbations to final hidden states and using a lightweight classifier to predict answer correctness. |
| Outcome: | CCPS significantly outperforms existing methods on LLMs from 8B to 32B parameters in multiple-choice and open-ended formats. |
InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Mohammad Beigi, Ying Shen, Runing Yang, Zihao Lin, Qifan Wang, Ankith Mohan, Jianfeng He, Ming Jin, Chang-Tien Lu, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with generating reliable outputs, often producing high-confidence inaccuracies known as hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages contrastive learning on internal states including attention states, feed-forward states, and activation states of all layers to enhance confidence estimation in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The framework outperforms existing methods in the hallucination detection benchmark HaluEval and the previous methods at the same time. |
Confidence Estimation for LLMs in Multi-turn Interactions (2026.findings-acl)
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Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li, Tiancheng Hu, Yijiang River Dong, Deqing Yang, Nigel Collier
| Challenge: | Despite recent progress, most prior work studies confidence in single-turn question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a logit-based probe that measures confidence in multi-turn dialogues . they propose 'infoECE' and a "hinter-guesser" paradigm for generating controlled evaluations based on data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is grounded in calibration and monotonicity of confidence as more information becomes available. |
LoVeC: Reinforcement Learning for Better Verbalized Confidence in Long-Form Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection are limited to short-form question answering tasks and do not generalize well to open-ended generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains LLMs to append a numerical confidence score to each generated statement during long-form generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 20 faster than traditional self-consistency methods while achieving better calibration. |
All Roads Lead to Rome: Graph-Based Confidence Estimation for Large Language Model Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for confidence estimation are primarily designed for factual QA tasks and fail to generalize to reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of training-free, graph-based confidence estimation methods tailored to reasoning tasks that exploit graph properties such as centrality, path convergence, and path weighting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve confidence estimation and performance on two downstream tasks. |
Confidence Should Be Calibrated More Than One Turn Deep (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on confidence estimation and calibration focuses on single-turn settings . existing work on multi-turn calibration ignores the risks and potential of multi-turned conversations . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn calibration task that reframes calibration from a static property into a dynamic challenge central to reliable multi- turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model minimizes ECE@T and leverages ConfChat to improve confidence . the proposed model preserves and even enhances model performance in multi-turn interactions. |
GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that provide detailed, constructive feedback on academic papers struggle with review fidelity. |
| Approach: | They explore factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems . large language models have shown remarkable progress in tasks from text generation to code synthesis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose language models in acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30% submissions to ICLR 2025. |