On Verbalized Confidence Scores for LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14737v1
• Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2024 11:10:36 GMT
• Title: On Verbalized Confidence Scores for LLMs
• Authors: Daniel Yang, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Makoto Yamada,
• Abstract summary: Uncertainty quantification for large language models (LLMs) can establish more human trust into their responses.<n>This work focuses on asking the LLM itself to verbalize its uncertainty with a confidence score as part of its output tokens.<n>We assess the reliability of verbalized confidence scores with respect to different datasets, models, and prompt methods.
• Score: 25.160810008907397
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) and their tight integration into our daily life make it essential to dedicate efforts towards their trustworthiness. Uncertainty quantification for LLMs can establish more human trust into their responses, but also allows LLM agents to make more informed decisions based on each other's uncertainty. To estimate the uncertainty in a response, internal token logits, task-specific proxy models, or sampling of multiple responses are commonly used. This work focuses on asking the LLM itself to verbalize its uncertainty with a confidence score as part of its output tokens, which is a promising way for prompt- and model-agnostic uncertainty quantification with low overhead. Using an extensive benchmark, we assess the reliability of verbalized confidence scores with respect to different datasets, models, and prompt methods. Our results reveal that the reliability of these scores strongly depends on how the model is asked, but also that it is possible to extract well-calibrated confidence scores with certain prompt methods. We argue that verbalized confidence scores can become a simple but effective and versatile uncertainty quantification method in the future. Our code is available at https://github.com/danielyxyang/llm-verbalized-uq .

Related papers

• Uncertainty Distillation: Teaching Language Models to Express Semantic Confidence [16.311538811237536]
  Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for factual question-answering. For these verbalized expressions of uncertainty to be meaningful, they should reflect the error rates at the expressed level of confidence. Many prior methods calculate lexical uncertainty, estimating a model's confidence in the specific string it generated.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-03-18T21:29:29Z)
• Aligning Large Language Models for Faithful Integrity Against Opposing Argument [71.33552795870544]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. They can be easily misled by unfaithful arguments during conversations, even when their original statements are correct. We propose a novel framework, named Alignment for Faithful Integrity with Confidence Estimation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-02T16:38:21Z)
• Learning to Route with Confidence Tokens [43.63392143501436]
  We study the extent to which large language models can reliably indicate confidence in their answers. We propose Self-REF, a lightweight training strategy to teach LLMs to express confidence in a reliable manner. Compared to conventional approaches such as verbalizing confidence and examining token probabilities, we demonstrate empirically that confidence tokens show significant improvements in downstream routing and rejection learning tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-17T07:28:18Z)
• Uncertainty is Fragile: Manipulating Uncertainty in Large Language Models [79.76293901420146]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) are employed across various high-stakes domains, where the reliability of their outputs is crucial. Our research investigates the fragility of uncertainty estimation and explores potential attacks. We demonstrate that an attacker can embed a backdoor in LLMs, which, when activated by a specific trigger in the input, manipulates the model's uncertainty without affecting the final output.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-15T23:41:11Z)
• Factual Confidence of LLMs: on Reliability and Robustness of Current Estimators [6.403926452181712]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to be unreliable in the factuality of their answers. We present a survey and empirical comparison of estimators of factual confidence. Our experiments indicate that trained hidden-state probes provide the most reliable confidence estimates.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-19T10:11:37Z)
• Cycles of Thought: Measuring LLM Confidence through Stable Explanations [53.15438489398938]
  Large language models (LLMs) can reach and even surpass human-level accuracy on a variety of benchmarks, but their overconfidence in incorrect responses is still a well-documented failure mode. We propose a framework for measuring an LLM's uncertainty with respect to the distribution of generated explanations for an answer.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-05T16:35:30Z)
• Confidence Under the Hood: An Investigation into the Confidence-Probability Alignment in Large Language Models [14.5291643644017]
  We introduce the concept of Confidence-Probability Alignment. We probe the alignment between models' internal and expressed confidence. Among the models analyzed, OpenAI's GPT-4 showed the strongest confidence-probability alignment.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-25T15:42:04Z)
• When to Trust LLMs: Aligning Confidence with Response Quality [49.371218210305656]
  We propose CONfidence-Quality-ORDer-preserving alignment approach (CONQORD) It integrates quality reward and order-preserving alignment reward functions. Experiments demonstrate that CONQORD significantly improves the alignment performance between confidence and response accuracy.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-26T09:42:46Z)
• Think Twice Before Trusting: Self-Detection for Large Language Models through Comprehensive Answer Reflection [90.71323430635593]
  We propose a novel self-detection paradigm that considers the comprehensive answer space beyond LLM-generated answers. Building upon this paradigm, we introduce a two-step framework, which firstly instructs LLM to reflect and provide justifications for each candidate answer. This framework can be seamlessly integrated with existing approaches for superior self-detection.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-15T02:38:26Z)
• TrustScore: Reference-Free Evaluation of LLM Response Trustworthiness [58.721012475577716]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains, prompting a surge in their practical applications. This paper introduces TrustScore, a framework based on the concept of Behavioral Consistency, which evaluates whether an LLMs response aligns with its intrinsic knowledge.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-19T21:12:14Z)
• Self-Evaluation Improves Selective Generation in Large Language Models [54.003992911447696]
  We reformulate open-ended generation tasks into token-level prediction tasks. We instruct an LLM to self-evaluate its answers. We benchmark a range of scoring methods based on self-evaluation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-12-14T19:09:22Z)
• Quantifying Uncertainty in Answers from any Language Model and Enhancing their Trustworthiness [16.35655151252159]
  We introduce BSDetector, a method for detecting bad and speculative answers from a pretrained Large Language Model. Our uncertainty quantification technique works for any LLM accessible only via a black-box API.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-30T17:53:25Z)
• An evaluation of word-level confidence estimation for end-to-end automatic speech recognition [70.61280174637913]
  We investigate confidence estimation for end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) We provide an extensive benchmark of popular confidence methods on four well-known speech datasets. Our results suggest a strong baseline can be obtained by scaling the logits by a learnt temperature.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-01-14T09:51:59Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.