VERDI: Single-Call Confidence Estimation for Verification-Based LLM Judges via Decomposed Inference

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11334v1
• Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 23:39:19 GMT
• Title: VERDI: Single-Call Confidence Estimation for Verification-Based LLM Judges via Decomposed Inference
• Abstract summary: VERDI (VERification-Decomposed Inference Inference) is a method that extracts confidence from a structured judge.<n> VERDI decomposes each evaluation into sub-checks and derives three structural signals.<n>On three public benchmarks, VERDI achieves AUROC 0.72-0.91 on GPT-4.1-mini and 0.66-0.80 on GPT-5.4-mini.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: LLM-as-Judge systems are widely deployed for automated evaluation, yet practitioners lack reliable methods to know when a judge's verdict should be trusted. Token log-probabilities, the standard post-hoc confidence signal, are unavailable for many commercial LLMs and, even when accessible, saturate above 0.999 with structured JSON output. We introduce VERDI (VERification-Decomposed Inference), a method that extracts confidence from the reasoning trace a structured judge already produces, with no additional inference calls. VERDI decomposes each verification-style evaluation into sub-checks and derives three structural signals: Step-Verdict Alignment, Claim-Level Margin, and Evidence Grounding Score. We combine them with Platt-scaled logistic regression. On three public benchmarks, VERDI achieves AUROC 0.72-0.91 on GPT-4.1-mini and 0.66-0.80 on GPT-5.4-mini. On Qwen3.5-4B/9B/27B, where answer-token logprobs are anti-calibrated (higher confidence on errors, AUROC 0.32-0.49), VERDI achieves 0.56-0.70. We additionally validate on a production system with eight rubrics (AUROC 0.73-0.88 on factual rubrics), demonstrate cross-model transfer (AUROC 0.66-0.69), and show that a 33M-parameter NLI (Natural Language Inference) model provides a scalable alternative to regex extraction.

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