CogniConsole: Externalizing Inference-Time Control as a Formal Abstraction for Reliable LLM Interactions

In black-box large language model (LLM) services, response reliability is often only partially observable at decision time, while stronger inference pathways incur substantial computational cost, inducing a budgeted sequential decision problem: for each request, the system should decide whether the default low-cost response is sufficiently reliable or whether additional computation should be allocated to improve response quality. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Ver}ifiable \textbf{O}bservations for Risk-aware \textbf{I}nference \textbf{C}ontrol (\textsc{Veroic}), a framework for adaptive inference control in black-box LLM settings, which formulates request-time control as a \textit{partially observable Markov decision process} to capture partial observability and sequential budget coupling. It constructs a lightweight verifiable observation channel from the input-output pair by aggregating heterogeneous quality signals into a belief state over latent response reliability, which is then used by a budget-aware policy to decide whether to return the default output or trigger a higher-cost inference pathway. Experiments on diverse tasks show that \textsc{Veroic} achieves improved quality-cost trade-offs, stronger risk estimation and calibration, and more robust long-horizon inference control than competitive baselines.

This paper presents NoisyCoconut, a novel inference-time method that enhances large language model (LLM) reliability by manipulating internal representations. Unlike fine-tuning methods that require extensive retraining, NoisyCoconut operates directly on model representations during inference and requires no retraining. Rather than training models to reason in latent space, we inject controlled noise into latent trajectories to generate diverse reasoning paths. Agreement among these paths provides a confidence signal, enabling models to abstain when uncertain. We demonstrate that this approach achieves effective coverage-accuracy tradeoffs across multiple reasoning benchmarks without requiring access to training data or modification of model parameters. This approach provides a practical pathway to improving the reliability of LLM outputs while maintaining compatibility with existing models. Our experiments show that unanimous agreement among noise-perturbed paths reduces error rates from 40-70% to below 15%, enabling models to exceed 95% accuracy on mathematical reasoning tasks through selective abstention.

This discussion argues that sequential statistical inference can naturally contribute to LLM trustworthiness. In deployment, LLM systems are queried repeatedly, conditioned on evolving contexts, and incorporate user or tool feedback, and may exhibit behavioral shifts after model updates or distribution changes. The discussion is organized around three tasks: representation, modeling LLM interactions as dependent stochastic processes rather than isolated prompt--response pairs; validity, developing uncertainty guarantees that remain meaningful under dependence, repeated use, and adaptation; and monitoring, using sequential alarms and change-point detection to identify shifts in calibration, hallucination rates, refusal behavior, fairness, or other task-relevant properties. This perspective complements recent surveys by viewing trustworthy LLM deployment as a problem of statistical process control.