QA-Calibration of Language Model Confidence Scores
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06615v2
- Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2025 08:32:14 GMT
- Title: QA-Calibration of Language Model Confidence Scores
- Abstract summary: generative question-and-answering systems need to provide well-calibrated confidence scores.<n>Existing calibration methods aim to ensure that the confidence score is, *on average*, indicative of the likelihood that the answer is correct.<n>We introduce QA-calibration, which ensures calibration holds across different question-and-answer groups.
- Score: 31.04440851437498
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: To use generative question-and-answering (QA) systems for decision-making and in any critical application, these systems need to provide well-calibrated confidence scores that reflect the correctness of their answers. Existing calibration methods aim to ensure that the confidence score is, *on average*, indicative of the likelihood that the answer is correct. We argue, however, that this standard (average-case) notion of calibration is difficult to interpret for decision-making in generative QA. To address this, we generalize the standard notion of average calibration and introduce QA-calibration, which ensures calibration holds across different question-and-answer groups. We then propose discretized posthoc calibration schemes for achieving QA-calibration. We establish distribution-free guarantees on the performance of this method and validate our method on confidence scores returned by elicitation prompts across multiple QA benchmarks and large language models (LLMs).
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