Language Model Calibration

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43 papers in the last four weeks, up 330% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 247

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

Baszta: Data-Centric Fine-Tuning of a Polish Multi-Label Safety Classifier

We develop a multi-label Polish content-safety classifier by fine-tuning allegro/herbert-base-cased (124M) across five categories (hate, vulgarity, sexual content, crime, self-harm) using a Focal + R-Drop objective, and evaluate the resulting model against Bielik Guard (Sójka) on the shared out-of-distribution Gadzi Język benchmark. Both systems are given per-category threshold tuning on the same calibration split. Under that matched protocol our model holds a small but statistically significant lead in micro F1, while an apparent macro-F1 lead does not survive: it was an artifact of comparing a tuned model against an untuned one. We also report what that micro figure is worth. Because Gadzi Język is 97% crime-positive, a classifier that flags crime on every input and nothing else already scores 0.910 micro F1 on the same test split, so micro separates neither system from a degenerate strategy and macro is the column that does. Per-category and per-protocol figures are reported in Section 4. The residual out-of-distribution gap is one of calibration rather than discrimination. Ranking quality stays high while positive probabilities collapse, and per-category temperature scaling recovers the loss where Platt scaling and isotonic regression do not. That recovery turns out to be conditional on the calibration set containing safe text. Gadzi Język contains almost none, so thresholds fitted on it flag crime on every safe input, and a balanced refit buys a deployable operating point at the cost of adversarial recall. We report both operating points rather than only the flattering one. Two changes that are standard practice, per-class cost-sensitive weighting and mean pooling, each raise in-distribution macro F1 while lowering the out-of-distribution figure, which indicates that robustness has to be selected for directly rather than inherited from in-distribution accuracy.

Adam Górski, Mateusz Jąkalak, Rafał Jakubowski

Billennium S.A.

Multi-Label Classification Language Model Safety Evaluation OOD Generalization Content Moderation Language Model Calibration Safety Filtering

Sep 23, 2026cs.CL

Can LLMs Catch a Rigged Backtest? A Clean-Control Calibration Benchmark

Backtest auditing is a calibration problem: high flaw recall is not useful when the model falsely flags matched clean strategies. We build a 96-item paired benchmark in which every flawed backtest has a clean control that holds strategy, dates, code style, labels, and reporting scaffold fixed while changing one methodology detail. A deterministic scorer separates flaw recall, clean-control false positives, evidence localization, and fix relevance. Over 1440 cached audits from four text endpoints, the primary DeepSeek auditor reaches 100.0% closed and clean-aware code recall, but open prompts over-flag 93.8% of clean code controls, and clean-aware all-three specificity is 87.5% even where recall saturates. A clean-aware warning drops DeepSeek code false positives from 20.8% (95% CI 11.7--34.3) to 0.0% (0.0--7.4) at unchanged recall, while the budget anchor still flags 38/48 clean controls under the same prompt. Reporting recall alone would rank three of these four models identically; reporting the clean-control rate separates them by 79 points.

Makar Ulesov, Vladislav Smirnov, Omar Ibrahim +1

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) · School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh

Benchmark Auditing LLM Auditing Language Model Calibration

Sep 22, 2026cs.CL

Calibration as a First-Class Criterion in LLM Evaluation

Calibration of language models -- the alignment between expressed or implicit confidence and empirical correctness -- is a well-studied subfield within NLP. Methods to measure it already exist. The problem is adoption: outside this subfield, NLP research regularly introduces new models, datasets, and benchmarks without checking whether the model's confidence scores are meaningful. We argue that this adoption gap is a major obstacle to trustworthy LLM evaluation. Miscalibration causes problems in two distinct areas: at deployment, where overconfident mistakes cause real harm, and inside the research pipeline, where methods like LLM-as-a-judge, synthetic data generation, and active learning rely on calibrated confidence without verifying it. Standard calibration metrics only require two inputs per example: a confidence score and a correctness judgment. Most benchmarks in use today already provide both, meaning calibration can be reported immediately. For open-ended generation, however, defining these two inputs is still an open challenge. We argue that each NLP subfield should pair its main performance metric with a calibration score and call for treating calibration as an essential property of every model rather than a niche topic.

Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Katharina von der Wense

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany · University of Colorado Boulder, USA

LLM Evaluation Confidence Estimation in Language Models Language Model Calibration LLM Reliability

Sep 22, 2026cs.CL

How to Estimate Whether You Have Found Several Needles in a Haystack: Measuring Calibration in Multi-Label Text Classification

A key factor in deciding whether to trust an automatic prediction is its confidence score, which should be calibrated to match the actual probability of the prediction being correct. Most confidence calibration metrics target binary or multi-class tasks, while multi-label calibration remains largely underexplored. Multi-label classification tasks, such as assigning medical codes to clinical notes or determining news topics, are usually dominated by a large number of negatives, i.e., labels that do not apply. We show that existing binning schemes to compute label-wise expected calibration error either underestimate the error, simply reflect label frequency, or suffer from many bins with very few instances. To achieve trustworthy label-wise calibration errors, we propose a new binning scheme that gives equal weight to positive and negative label assignments. Our empirical study demonstrates that in contrast to existing binning schemes, our new scheme results in meaningful estimates of calibration error in hierarchical and in extreme multi-label classification. We also show that calibrating confidence scores of large language models for multi-label predictions is an open challenge. Our detailed analysis lays the foundation for further research by providing a solid evaluation metric for measuring calibration in multi-label classification.

Sophie Henning, Georg Hofmann, Alexander Schulte +2

TU Munich · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) · LMU Munich +3

Multi-Label Classification Language Model Calibration Model Calibration Classification

Sep 21, 2026cs.AI

Pinocchio: Fast Uncertainty Estimates for Black-Box Language Models

In high-stakes decision-making applications of large language models (LLMs), practitioners require not only accurate LLMs but also uncertainty estimates for their predictions. Existing approaches to uncertainty estimation for LLMs require access to log-probabilities output by the model or require fine-tuning access. However, many industrial LLM products use closed-source API models, and many such API models like GPT do not return log-probabilities and may not allow fine-tuning. We introduce Pinocchio, an external calibrator that estimates the correctness of responses from black-box API models. Trained jointly on responses from seven LLMs, it achieves 0.862 AUROC predicting the correctness of held-out responses from those same models, and shows zero-shot transfer to thirteen unseen models across eight organizations. Our model needs only a single forward pass to generate an uncertainty estimate and requires no access to the target model's logits, weights, or internal states. A lightweight text only 0.8B checkpoint matches our largest model's AUROC. We release code for adding uncertainty estimation to existing repos in only two additional lines of code.

Kevin David Hayes, Arka Pal, Haosong Zhang +2

Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland · Ritual AI · Fudan University +1

Language Model Error Detection Confidence Estimation in Language Models Language Model Calibration LLM Uncertainty Estimation

Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

Evaluating Decision Models for Text Annotation in Computational Social Science

Computational social science increasingly relies on large language models for text annotation, and the validity of published findings now rests on the labels generated by such models. Decision models, a new model class built for categorical question answering, answer typed questions with a choice, a probability distribution over the label set, and a confidence score rather than free text, at a small fraction of frontier inference prices. Whether their answers are accurate, and whether that stated confidence can be trusted on social science constructs, are unknown. Here, we mirror the evaluation of Ziems et al. (2024) on 18 computational social science classification tasks (7,977 items), comparing the first commercial decision model and two open-weight counterparts against 19 frontier and open-weight language models under the same zero-shot protocol, and extending the decision-model comparison to eleven open-weight systems released in the week after it. The decision model trails the per-task best LLM on 14 of 15 evaluation tasks, with a median deficit of 11.6 macro-F1 points, at a median 44 times lower measured cost. Its confidence is better calibrated than the verbalized confidence of 16 of the 19 LLMs, yet three frontier models show lower median calibration error (0.157 against 0.066). While items above 0.9 confidence are typically labeled accurately (median accuracy 0.815), on one task, empathy in peer-support dialogues, the model reports high confidence while performing near chance. Nonetheless, our results suggest that decision models are useful as a first step in the annotation pipeline: routing low-confidence items to an LLM matches or exceeds the LLM alone at a quarter to half of its cost.

Hazem Ibrahim, Yasir Zaki

Computer Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE

LLM Evaluation LLM-Assisted Annotation Computational Social Science Language Model Calibration Classification

Sep 21, 2026cs.LG

SupportCal: Label-Free Calibration of Post-Trained LLMs via Reference Support and Corroboration

Post-training often improves task performance but can degrade confidence calibration, leaving post-trained language models (PoLMs) more overconfident than their corresponding pretrained language models (PLMs). Because task-specific labeled calibration data can be costly or unavailable, the corresponding PLM provides a natural label-free reference for post-hoc calibration. Prior agreement-gated PLM-referenced calibration fits a scalar temperature using only examples on which the PoLM and its PLM reference agree, excluding disagreement examples because direct alignment can drive the fitted temperature excessively high and induce under-confidence. We revisit this binary treatment. A controlled reintroduction diagnostic reveals a non monotonic aggregate effect: admitting a moderate fraction of disagreement examples can improve calibration, whereas the benefit diminishes as unit weight inclusion approaches the full disagreement set. We introduce SupportCal, a label-free post-hoc method that retains agreement examples at unit weight and assigns disagreement examples continuous weights based on the own-base PLM's relative support and corroboration from pretrained references selected from a size-compatible candidate pool. We further characterize when the resulting weighted objective admits a finite optimal temperature. Across MedMCQA and MathQA, SupportCal yields lower mean ECE than the agreement-only baseline for nearly all evaluated target-model configurations; supplementary TweetEval Sentiment results show the same pattern on a fixed-label classification task.

Linhan Luo, Lequan Lin, Dai Shi +3

The University of Sydney · University of Cambridge · The University of Adelaide

Post-Hoc Calibration Language Model Calibration LLM Post-Training

Sep 21, 2026stat.ML

OSCAR: Order-aware Scoring and Calibration for AI Rankings

Judge-specific sensitivity is useful for aggregating pairwise LLM evaluations, but its interpretation depends on which systematic presentation effects the ranking model includes. We introduce OSCAR, an order-aware framework for scoring and calibrating AI rankings, and study position as one such effect. In released judgments from 18 evaluators, the all-response A-minus-B score difference ranges from

-63.11

to

98.31

percentage points. Matching question text, response texts, candidate identities, and judge within the released table gives an overall difference of

24.22

points (95% interval

[22.90,25.54]

), conditional on the released text mapping. A controlled calculation isolates the potential consequence: with true sensitivity fixed at one, omitting a position intercept of four reduces the population-optimal slope to

0.0771

. We extend sensitivity-based ranking with judge-specific position, length, and family terms, characterize local omission-induced displacement and an identification failure, and propagate prompt-cluster uncertainty to adjusted comparisons. Across four released datasets, position provides the largest stand-alone predictive improvement. Refitting bootstrap comparisons show more selective gains from the full model over position-only adjustment. In dependent binary simulations, adjusting both the mean and covariance yields 94.4--95.2% coverage; correcting either alone is insufficient. At

N=10{,}000

, OSCAR reduces mean neutral-target RMSE from

0.1158

under the sensitivity-only model to

0.0237

.

You Liu, Yue Liu, Quanchao Lu +1

LLM Evaluation LLM-as-a-Judge Pairwise Ranking Language Model Calibration

Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

Calibrated Decisions at Scale: Converting Police Crash Narratives into Probabilistic Crash Variables with a System One Model (Jev)

Crash datasets that carry an investigator narrative hold information the coded fields omit. Coding those narratives at scale has been blocked by three obstacles. Frontier large language models are costly at that scale, their generated text cannot be verified, and no rule says how much output a human must check. This paper formulates narrative coding as gated, typed decisions answered by Jev, a System One model that returns probabilities over analyst-defined options and generates no text. A screen covered 499,500 Texas narratives and 195,857 were coded with a 27-question schema. Cost is governed by schema size rather than narrative length. The probabilities are audited against coded fields and against 2,416 blinded human judgments drawn under a stated sampling design. Two frontier large language models are benchmarked on the same records. Against human labels the typed model attains an F1 of 0.908. One frontier model gains 0.059 and the other is indistinguishable from it. Calibration varies by model rather than by paradigm, so each model must be audited. Recalibration on the same labels reduces calibration error by a factor of 3.3. Agreement with coded fields understates fidelity to the narrative by a median of 0.26 in kappa. A resolution-floor bound covers any model that reports probabilities on a discrete grid. A review budget over flagged records gives the records a human must read per variable and per year. Adding the calibrated variables to the coded fields raises the injury and fatal crashes attributed to nine factors by 10,747 per year.

Amir Rafe, Subasish Das

Ingram School of Engineering, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

LLM Auditing Language Model Calibration

Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

Open-Jev Judgments on CallScreenBench: Calibrated One-Pass Scam Screening with a Small Language Model

Screening a phone call for fraud needs a trustworthy probability after every caller turn, in milliseconds. Jev-style typed decisions promise exactly that: declared options go in, one calibrated probability per option comes out of a single forward pass, with no generated text. We test an open implementation of this readout, JevLite, on scam-call screening: Qwen3-4B is LoRA-tuned so that the temperature-scaled softmax over two answer-label logits is P(scam). On 41 held-out CallScreenBench scenarios (577 per-turn decisions) a three-seed ensemble reaches AUROC .974 with calibration error .052, non-inferior to an LLM judge (MiniMax-M3) at a pre-registered .02 margin, with no false alarms on legitimate calls, decisions 1.14 turns earlier under the same hang-up rule, and 64.5 ms per decision on one consumer GPU, 4.9x lower than the same backbone fine-tuned to generate its answer. The gain is in the readout and calibration, not accuracy: a fine-tuned ModernBERT encoder is not significantly worse, the recipe was selected with test-set exposure, and all callers are synthetic. We claim no architectural novelty; the contribution is the application and an evaluation reporting calibration, false alarms and decision timing alongside AUROC.

Simiao Ren, Kidus Zewde, Xingyu Shen +6

Scam.ai (Reality Inc.)

LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Evaluation Language Model Calibration

Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

The Missing "I Don't Know": Why Three Reasoning-Reliability Findings Converge on Calibrated Abstention

Three recent results describe what look like unrelated LLM reliability problems. Yin et al. (2026) show reasoning RL collapses tool-reliability representations. Suleymanov et al. (2026) show that under safety-constrained generation, large models rewrite flagged spans while small models truncate. Bastounis et al. (2024) prove any consistent-reasoning system without an implicit "I don't know" function must hallucinate infinitely often on broad problem classes. We argue these findings converge on a single intervention: calibrated abstention is what each independently identifies as the missing capability, even though the unavailability they document, a capability gap, a policy gap, and a recursion-theoretic gap, has a different source in each case. Honesty post-training has narrowed the gap in deployed models, but principled closure of the class Bastounis identifies requires a calibrated abstention function whose training signal at the leaderboard level is absent: dominant benchmarks assign zero reward to decline, so the leaderboard gradient that would select for the function does not exist. We propose four changes to evaluation: triple-scoring, abstention-rate reporting, capability-stratified evaluation, and mandatory calibration metrics. Benchmark reform is necessary, not sufficient, for closing the gap the theorem identifies.

Srijith Ravikumar

Amazon.com LLC

Language Model Safety Evaluation Language Model Calibration LLM Reliability

Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

Coupled Calibration and Learning: Mitigating Teacher Bias in LLM Distillation without Target-Domain Reward Feedback

Large language model (LLM) distillation aims to transfer the capabilities of a powerful teacher to a smaller student. Direct imitation, however, can also transfer the teacher's systematic bias and errors. This challenge is particularly pronounced under covariate shift, when the teacher's reliability on target questions is uncertain and target-domain reward feedback is unavailable. We propose Coupled Calibration and Learning (CCL), an LLM distillation algorithm that couples teacher calibration with student updates through token-level branching, using reward feedback only on source questions. Each iteration calibrates the teacher using source feedback and then uses the calibrated teacher to train the student on target questions. The updated student, in turn, informs subsequent calibration. In an autoregressive policy framework, we prove that the output student's expected average Kullback-Leibler divergence to the oracle student converges to zero at a polynomial rate in the number of iterations. The oracle maximizes the true reference-regularized target reward within the student class, which need not represent the unrestricted optimal policy. Our analysis quantifies the progress of projected student gradient updates while controlling the error in teacher calibration. We further establish a separation from regularized direct matching: its error relative to the oracle student can remain bounded away from zero even when the teacher achieves higher regularized target reward than every student policy. These results demonstrate that LLM distillation can overcome persistent teacher bias and recover the optimal student through coupled calibration and learning, without target-domain reward feedback.

Haichen Hu, Yuheng Zhang, David Simchi-Levi

MIT · UIUC

Language Model Calibration Language Model Distillation Knowledge Distillation

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

Four Ledgers, Not One Score: Responsible Communication of LLM-Judge Calibration in Biomedical ML

Synthetic perturbations appear to offer inexpensive calibration data for LLM evaluators in biomedical ML, where expert review is scarce. Yet a planted mutation key is neither a detector output nor automatically human ground truth. We formalize four distinct ledgers: planted perturbations, independent detector outputs, source-linked human dispositions, and human-added discoveries. We then audit the evaluation design, scoring code, read paths, and current human records of a private synthetic Japanese care-handoff workflow. The factory stored 69 planted error cards across 47 targets. Final review covers 22 targets and contains 22 confirmed imported proposals, 9 rejected proposals, and 79 human-added cards; only 3 reviewed targets are double annotated. Passing imported plant keys to a generic detector scorer yields 22/(22+9)=0.710 and 22/(22+79)=0.218. A direct audit identity shows that these values are proposal-confirmation yield and submitted-ledger composition, not judge precision and recall, because no independent detector realization was preserved for the audited proposals in the available records. The audit also finds source-name collisions, row shadowing, forced severity, vacuous ratio defaults, and unsupported zero-support field weights. We contribute a provenance-aware claim audit, a storage contract, and a minimum calibration gate for responsibly communicating biomedical ML capability claims. This single-workflow forensic case is an existence proof of a failure mode, not an estimate of its prevalence: existing human work supports an exploratory audit of synthetic proposals, but not LLM-judge operating characteristics, clinical validity, corpus prevalence, or robust inter-annotator agreement.

Sidi Chang, Peiying Zhu

Blossom AI San Francisco, CA, USA

LLM-as-a-Judge LLM Auditing Language Model Calibration Clinical Language Model Evaluation Synthetic Data Evaluation

Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

R2VC: Modular Fact-Checking with Retrieval, Verification, and Confidence Calibration

Large language models are increasingly used for automated fact checking, but end-to-end prompting often entangles evidence retrieval, reasoning, and uncertainty estimation, making failures difficult to diagnose and confidence difficult to trust. We present R2VC, a modular retrieve, reason, verify, calibrate architecture for evidence-grounded fact checking with citations and abstention. R2VC combines hybrid sparse+dense retrieval over Wikipedia, a supervised fine-tuned and DPO-aligned generator that produces diverse structured verdict candidates, an external NLI cross-encoder for evidence-based candidate selection, and a lightweight sequence-level calibrator for confidence estimation and selective abstention. On FEVER, an 8B backbone with R2VC achieves 13.74% higher accuracy than baseline. Ablation studies show that verifier-based candidate selection and confidence calibration are the largest contributors to performance. Removing candidate selection drops FEVER accuracy to 76.24%, while removing calibration nearly doubles the Brier score to 0.161. A manual analysis of 250 errors further shows that retrieval failures, especially wrong-entity evidence, remain the dominant bottleneck. Together, these results show that modular fact-checking pipelines can substantially improve both predictive accuracy and confidence reliability in open-domain verification.

Dhruv Dixit, Paritosh Pandey

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, New Jersey, United States · Department of Computer Science University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Automated Fact-Checking Language Model Calibration LLM Uncertainty Estimation

Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Can We Trust LLM Judges: A Study of Capability-Dependent Biases and Multi-Judge Ensemble for Bias Calibration

LLMs are increasingly used as automated judges for model training and evaluation, yet individual judges exhibit systematic biases that undermine reliability. Much of prior work has studied biases in pairwise LLM-as-a-judge settings; in this paper, we focus on absolute scoring tasks, which mirror more realistic use cases. Across four benchmarks and six models (36 judge-examinee pairs), we show that a model's task accuracy strongly predicts its judging accuracy (Pearson

r \geq 0.90

on most models) and inversely predicts its directional bias (

r \leq -0.83

), but that accuracy alone does not ensure fair evaluation: more capable examinee models consistently receive more lenient judgments from all judges (

r \geq 0.83

). To address this, we propose calibrated weighted majority voting (WMV), an ensemble evaluation method that aggregates multiple LLM judges weighted by online estimates of their false-positive and false-negative rates. We introduce a disagreement-based estimator that derives these error rates purely from inter-judge agreement patterns, requiring no ground-truth labels or task metadata. In a simulated experiment with shifting task distributions, our label-free WMV tracks an oracle with perfect error-rate knowledge to within 0.5 percentage points on average, outperforming both individual judges and unweighted majority voting. These results demonstrate that principled multi-judge calibration can simultaneously improve accuracy and correct for systematic leniency without requiring labeled data, offering a scalable path to reliable automated evaluation as model capabilities increase.

Gemma Zhang, Prachi Badarayani, Asmi Kumar +2

Microsoft · Massachusetts Institute of Technology

LLM Evaluation LLM-as-a-Judge Language Model Calibration LLM Reliability Language Model Bias Evaluation Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge+1

Sep 13, 2026cs.SE

Efficiency Hallucination: Formalizing and Measuring Behavioral Calibration in LLM-Based Code Optimization

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into automated code optimization introduces a critical reliability risk we term the Efficiency Hallucination: an LLM's tendency to issue non-functional mutations with unsubstantiated performance claims on already-optimized code. This is driven by the Evaluation Trap, wherein binary benchmarks incentivize unnecessary modifications over safely abstaining. We present a validation framework using classification penalty methods, evaluated across 180 optimization runs on nine models (GPT, Claude, Gemini) using EffiBench. Under standard prompts, models exhibit a 100% over-edit rate on optimal code. Our guardrail raises correct abstention from 0% to to 44.4%, preserving a 100% edit rate on sub-optimal code with zero false abstentions. Calibration is uneven: GPT-5.4 Mini approaches near-perfect abstention, and simple code is recognized more reliably than complex code. Our framework offers a training-free mechanism to mitigate LLM overconfidence before deployment in production.

Sarah Wilson, Gail Kaiser, Patrick Musau

Google · Columbia University · Vanderbilt University

Selective Prediction Large Language Model-Guided Optimization Language Model Calibration

Sep 13, 2026cs.DC

TriCalRAG: A Three-Strategy, Retrieval-Augmented Benchmark for On-Premise LLM-Based Root Cause Analysis in AIOps

Cloud-hosted large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for root cause analysis (RCA) in AIOps pipelines, but they introduce data privacy risk, network latency, and per-query cost that scale poorly with production log volumes. We present TriCalRAG, a benchmark evaluating open-weight LLMs served locally via vLLM on a single high-memory workstation GPU (NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000, 96GB) against a classical LSTM-based log anomaly detector (DeepLog), across four real, publicly available log datasets (BGL, HDFS, Thunderbird, OpenStack). We evaluate two open-weight models (Qwen2.5-14B, Mistral-Small) under three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over a labeled incident history, reporting accuracy, precision/recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals across 3 random seeds, alongside throughput and VRAM footprint. Our results show that RAG not only improves mean F1 by 0.10-0.27 over zero-shot prompting but, more importantly, substantially stabilizes model calibration: zero-shot prompting drives both models toward near-degenerate behavior (predicting "anomaly" on up to 100% of incidents on some datasets), while RAG keeps predicted-positive rates close to the true class balance in the majority of configurations. Mistral-Small achieves higher macro-averaged F1 than Qwen2.5-14B (0.644 vs. 0.560) but exhibits calibration failures in more configurations (7 vs. 5 of 12), while running at roughly half the throughput - indicating the better model choice depends on whether a deployment prioritizes peak accuracy or predictable behavior across prompting conditions. Ablations show batching scales throughput 41 times on a single card and that 4-bit quantization reduces latency 20% with no measurable accuracy loss. We release our benchmark harness, dataset splits, and evaluation code to support reproducible on-premise AIOps research.

Rohit Patel, Susil Kumar Mohanty, Jeenal Chaudhary

Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Jodhpur, India

LLM Inference Efficiency Retrieval-Augmented Generation Online Anomaly Detection Language Model Calibration Root Cause Analysis

Sep 11, 2026cs.CL

Rethinking Verbalized Confidence for LLM-as-a-Judge: A Compatibility Shift on Post-2025 Proprietary Models

Verbalized confidence, long dismissed as overconfident, coarse, and prone to round-number clustering, is now the more robust soft-scoring mechanism for LLM-as-a-Judge on top-tier proprietary models. Across SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2, spanning up to 18 LLMs, we show that the standard advice to prefer log-probabilities no longer holds on post-2025 models, where verbalized confidence is the better signal. We call this a compatibility shift. On top of a standard verbalized-confidence baseline, we introduce two new ingredients: an overconfidence advisory and self-debate. Together they improve calibration, score-distribution spread, and robustness to task subjectivity. We further observe a generation effect: post-2025 models accommodate these two additions with little balanced-accuracy cost, whereas pre-2025 models pay a measurable penalty. Compared with logprob-based G-Eval, verbalized confidence is the more subjectivity-robust soft signal on GPT-family top-tier releases. The shift is invisible under accuracy-only reporting. Rather than defaulting to hard predictions, we recommend broader use of soft scoring in LLM-as-a-Judge. More broadly, verbalized confidence has moved from a weaker substitute for logprobs to a practical soft-scoring mechanism for contemporary LLM judges.

Yu-Chung Hsiao

Cisco Systems

LLM Evaluation LLM-as-a-Judge Confidence Estimation in Language Models Language Model Calibration Language Model Robustness Metacognition in Language Models

Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

ProbPlug: A Plugin Uncertainty Network for Reliable Confidence in LLM Binary Classification

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a broad range of classification settings, yet the reliability of their predictions remains a major obstacle to deployment in high-stakes scenarios. Although confidence estimation for LLMs has been widely studied, confidence calibration for LLM-based classification remains underexplored. We introduce ProbPlug, a lightweight confidence estimation framework for LLM-based binary classification, which predicts whether an output is correct using internal token features extracted from a frozen LLM. ProbPlug employs a self-attention module to aggregate hidden representations and can be integrated into the original inference pipeline without modifying the base model. Experiments across multiple tasks involving both text-based and multimodal large models show that ProbPlug provides more reliable confidence estimates, improves classification performance with negligible additional overhead, and exhibits strong generalization across tasks. These results indicate that ProbPlug serves as a practical solution for confidence estimation in LLM-based classification. Our code is publicly available at Github.

Jianzong Wang, Chuhang Liu, Botao Zhao +6

Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Shenzhen, China · Hubei University of Technology, Hubei, China

Confidence Estimation in Language Models Language Model Calibration LLM Reliability Classification LLM Uncertainty Estimation

Sep 9, 2026cs.AI

Scored vs. Generated Readouts in Behavioral Language Models: An Empirical Study of Elicitation Format

Language models fine-tuned on customer behavior can predict outcomes and generate explanations, but these readouts are often treated as interchangeable. Holding model checkpoint and prompt content fixed, we compare probabilities obtained by scoring answer tokens with predictions generated after a written rationale. Across 13 model-domain cells covering four retail tasks in three markets, including two using fully public data and checkpoints, the scored readout ranks outcomes more accurately in 12 of 13 cells (two-sided sign test, p approximately 0.003), by 1.5 to 14.5 points in area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Paired bootstrap confidence intervals exclude zero in every newly measured cell. The gap varies with task-specific supervision and mismatch between training and serving formats, ranging from -2.2 points for an untuned base model to +13.7 for rationale-format supervision. Analysis of approximately 9,000 rationales identifies two correlates: reduced reliance on the dominant predictive feature and convergence on stock formulations. Probability saturation does not track the gap. A third readout, eliciting a probability before any verdict, improves calibration (Brier score from 0.47 to 0.15) while ranking within noise of scoring, but only for outcome rates represented in training; it is worse than scoring when the scored head is already calibrated. We interpret these differences through the objectives matched by each readout, identify training choices that narrow the gap, and propose retaining generated rationales while sourcing ranking from the scored head.

Touchapon Kraisingkorn, Krittin Pachtrachai, Wachiravit Modecrua

Amity Research and Application Center (ARAC), Amity Group

LLM Evaluation Language Model Calibration

Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Calibration is the Bottleneck: An Action-Class Diagnostic of Multi-Turn Tool-Calling

Multi-turn tool calling is a core evaluation scenario for large language model (LLM) agents. On public tool-calling benchmarks, open-weight models now approach or even surpass closed-source frontier models in aggregate accuracy. However, this metric averages over many different multi-turn situations and obscures whether progress is balanced across them. We propose an action-class-oriented diagnostic framework that decomposes multi-turn failures into two orthogonal modes: action-class miscalibration and action-execution failure. The framework operates over a four-class action space (TOOL_CALL/ASK/REFUSE/CONFIRM) and introduces a self-revealing upper bound Acc <= GAR (Gold Action Recall); the two modes show up as bound violation (Acc > GAR, exposing state-grader masking of miscalibration) and large bound slack (GAR >> Acc, localizing execution failure within TOOL_CALL). We validate it on a panel of tool-calling models across multiple multi-turn benchmarks. Across our panel, the diagnostic reveals action-class miscalibration as a substantial failure mode the state grader cannot see. This gap inflates standing for heavily tool-trained families, which our diagnostic separates from families with context-appropriate action choice. Calibration is reshapable through context-only perturbations, but the reshape is heterogeneous: a single perturbation moves accuracy in opposite directions across families (up to +11.5 vs -21.0 pp on the same scenario), and its effect further depends on the perturbation mechanism. We argue that multi-turn tool-calling evaluations should supplement aggregate accuracy with action-class diagnostics that expose what the model actually does in each scenario.

Kangjia Zhao, Jiajun Li, Haozhan Shen +8

Zhejiang University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · National University of Singapore +3

Tool-Use Evaluation LLM Agent Evaluation Language Model Calibration Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation LLM Tool Use

Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

DualStake: Dual-Path Confidence Calibration in Deep Research Agents

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. However, these agents suffer from severe overconfidence, making their expressed confidence unreliable for user trust and downstream abstention. To address this, we augment the Deep Research pipeline with step confidence elicitation after each retrieval, building on the commonly used post-answer verbalized confidence. Interestingly, we find that Evidence Confidence (E-Conf), elicited after the final retrieval step, provides a stronger uncertainty signal than Answer Confidence (A-Conf), elicited after answer generation, and that A-Conf is largely shaped by E-Conf. Based on these findings, we propose DualStake, a dual-path calibration method that applies margin-clipped, confidence-dependent stake rewards to jointly align E-Conf and A-Conf with answer correctness while limiting extreme confidence optimization. Experiments on Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and Qwen3-4B across 8 QA benchmarks demonstrate that DualStake consistently improves calibration without sacrificing answer accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/FloXXXt/DualStake.

Yinuo Xu, Yuwei Liang, Jianjie Cheng +4

NLPR & MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Meituan Inc.

Deep Research Agents Language Model Calibration LLM Uncertainty Estimation Uncertainty Calibration

Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

Self-Reports Are Not Verification: Environment-Grounded Auditing of LLM Operators in Evolutionary Search

Language model agents increasingly propose actions, observe external feedback, and explain their own behavior. Their confidence and rationales are convenient monitoring signals, but convenience is not verification. We introduce an environment-grounded audit in which every intermediate proposal receives an exact outcome. A language model operates an evolutionary Contexto search whose feedback function assigns every valid guess an exact rank without human annotation. Across 200 runs spanning five configurations and three model families, four reporting configurations produce 12,249 self-reports. We test three assumptions: stated confidence is calibrated, inherited rationales affect later proposals, and fitness-based selection improves report quality. All three fail. Operators overstate top-100 success by factors of 4.8 to 9.3, while calibration and discrimination dissociate across model families. Controlled interventions on 754 inherited rationales bound any measured benefit of the genuine rationale to roughly 250 ranks. Neither fitness-based nor random selection produces a detectable selection differential or parent-to-offspring transmission in report accuracy, despite sharply different search behavior. Agent self-reports should therefore be treated as claims to verify against the environment, not as evidence of their own reliability.

Enrong Pan, Ryan Zhou, Ting Hu

Queen’s University

LLM Auditing Language Model Self-Assessment Language Model Calibration LLM Agent Reliability

Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Wrong Prediction, Right Answer: Recovering Evidence from Collapsed LLM Sequence Scores

When a large language model fails a reasoning task, it is often assumed to lack the underlying capability. However, this conflates a genuine absence of reasoning with a late-stage output bottleneck. We observe a consistent readout gap across diverse reasoning benchmarks: hidden-state probes successfully decode correct answers even when native sequence scoring completely collapses due to structural biases. To test whether instance-specific logic survives this collapse, we introduce a diagnostic protocol using a minimal, target-label-free additive correction. Fitting just two parameters on as few as 25 unlabeled examples recovers 9--34 accuracy points for Qwen3.5 models, transferring successfully to OLMo-2-1B and Llama-3.1-8B. Crucially, these recovered decisions persist on hard instances unresolved by simple lexical overlap and significantly exceed count-preserving permutation baselines. Our results show that many apparent zero-shot reasoning deficits are expression failures masking intact internal logic, urging a narrower interpretation of benchmark evaluations.

Qiyao Yan, Chenpeng Wang, Liangming Pan

State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University · School of Computer Science, Peking University · YiXin-AILab, YIXIN, Beijing, China +1

LLM Evaluation Language Model Calibration Implicit Reasoning in Language Models Language Modeling Language Model Probing LLM Reasoning

Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Calibrating Small Language Models for Claim Check-Worthiness Detection

Assessing claim check-worthiness is an essential first step in automated fact-checking pipelines. This work is motivated by a real deployment challenge at an early-stage startup: running large language models (LLMs) over every incoming claim is cost- and latency-prohibitive, yet smaller models sacrifice accuracy. We propose NN-PPI, a pointwise extension of Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI) that calibrates model predictions at inference time as a lightweight post-hoc layer, without re-training the underlying model. NN-PPI achieves weighted F1 gains ranging from 12% to 33.80% depending on the size and performance of the baseline model, bringing SLMs on par with larger LLMs. Beyond few-shot SLMs, NN-PPI further improves a production-deployed fine-tuned model, demonstrating that residual calibration is complementary to supervised fine-tuning. By recovering LLM-level accuracy from models that are an order of magnitude cheaper to serve, it makes accurate check-worthiness detection substantially cheaper to operate at scale. Our code and data can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/arr-claim-worthiness-F237.

Pratuat Amatya, V Venktesh, Vinay Setty

1Factiverse AS · University of Stavanger · 3Stockholm University

Claim Verification Small Language Models Language Model Calibration Prediction-Powered Inference

Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

CoMPASS: Collaborative Molecular Property Prediction via Adaptive Small-Large Model Synergy

Accurate molecular property prediction requires both statistical reliability and chemical reasoning. Graph neural networks can be calibrated directly on labeled assays but remain limited by the coverage of their training data. Large language models (LLMs) can compare molecular evidence and articulate chemical rationales, yet are unreliable as standalone quantitative predictors. The central challenge is therefore to determine when an LLM should influence a calibrated model and by how much. Here we present CoMPASS, a retrieval-calibrated framework for small-large model collaboration. CoMPASS retains a graph attention network (GAT) as the predictive anchor, retrieves locally relevant training molecules, provides attention-grounded evidence to an LLM, and converts its proposal into a bounded correction through an agreement-aware gate. Across six classification and two regression benchmarks, CoMPASS improves the GAT anchor in regions of correctable uncertainty while limiting LLM intervention in high-confidence regimes. Ablations show that the gains arise from validation-calibrated retrieval and bounded fusion rather than prompting alone. These results suggest that generative reasoning should augment calibrated prediction through evidence-grounded, controlled corrections rather than direct output replacement. Code is available at https://github.com/littlepeachs/CoMPASS.

Wentao Li, Jiangjie Qiu, Yijun Li +2

Beijing Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence for Advanced Chemical Engineering Materials · State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering and Low-Carbon Technology · Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University

Graph Neural Networks Language Model Calibration Molecular Property Prediction LLMs for Graph Learning

Aug 18, 2026cs.LG

Too Sure to Be Safe: Model Calibration for Reliable Log Anomaly Detection

Online log anomaly detection is critical for maintaining the reliability of large-scale computing systems. Although recent language model-based log anomaly detectors achieve strong detection performance, their confidence estimates remain poorly calibrated. We show that these detectors frequently assign excessive confidence to incorrect predictions, particularly for anomalous logs under severe class imbalance. Moreover, confidence on erroneous predictions remains persistently high even when conventional calibration metrics indicate good calibration, creating a critical reliability gap for operational monitoring systems. To address this issue, we propose Log Reconstruction and Distance (LoRD), a lightweight post-hoc calibration framework for reliable log anomaly detection. LoRD learns prediction-route-specific reliability models from latent representations of correctly classified validation samples and estimates prediction reliability through route-wise reconstruction distances. Based on the estimated reliability, LoRD selectively recalibrates high-risk predictions to suppress overconfident errors while preserving reliable predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale log benchmark datasets and multiple language model-based detectors demonstrate that LoRD consistently improves confidence reliability and substantially reduces overconfident anomaly-related errors without sacrificing anomaly detection performance.

Bin Li, Dongdong Wang, Siyang Lu

School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China · University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA · School of Computer and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

Post-Hoc Calibration Online Anomaly Detection Language Model Calibration LLM Reliability

Aug 13, 2026cs.CL

Are You Sure You're Sure? On the Impact of Instruction Tuning on Confidence and Lexical Diversity

Instruction-tuned language models achieve strong performance across a range of generation tasks, but have also recently been shown to exhibit verbalized overconfidence. In question answering, verbalized model overconfidence may be associated with the consistency of the generated supporting rationales. In this paper, we study whether corresponding changes in the lexical diversity of generated answer rationales accompany changes in model confidence induced by instruction tuning. We evaluate three matched base and instruction-tuned models across question-answering benchmarks and find that instruction tuning consistently alters answer confidence, despite limited changes in predictive accuracy and decreases in likelihood-based calibration. Secondly, we observe a non-uniform effect of instruction tuning on rationale diversity: cross-rationale diversity consistently decreases, whereas surface-level lexical diversity varies in both direction and magnitude across models and benchmarks. Finally, we find that these differences persist after controlling for answer selection and rationale length, confirming that confidence and rationale diversity capture distinct effects of instruction tuning.

Irina Proskurina, Mayank Kumar, Oyindolapo O. Komolafe

Cohere Labs Community · Laboratoire Hubert Curien, UMR CNRS 5516, Saint-Étienne, France · School of Computer Science Engineering and Technology (SCSET), Bennett University, Greater Noida, India +1

Confidence Estimation in Language Models Question Answering Language Model Calibration Instruction Tuning Metacognition in Language Models

Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

ConfTriage: A Calibration-Aware LLM Triage Framework for Pulmonary Nodule Malignancy with Selective Specialist Deferral

Pulmonary nodule malignancy prediction typically depends on image-trained specialist deep learning (DL) models that require substantial annotated imaging data and task-specific training. We investigate whether a generalist large language model (LLM), reading only a faithful natural-language rendering of standard nodule attributes, can serve as a calibrated triage layer. We propose ConfTriage, a confidence-calibrated method built on three pillars: language as the modality, calibration as the safety mechanism, and a selective specialist DL backstop for low-confidence cases. We prove two guarantees: a finite-sample combined-error bound yielding an explicit per-threshold operational certificate, and an oracle inequality showing that excess risk over the Bayes-optimal deferral classifier is controlled by the L1 calibration error of the LLM probability. A controlled seven-way input ablation across five frontier LLMs on LIDC-IDRI shows that natural-language descriptions dominate the diagnostic signal, while low-level image statistics are essentially diagnostically vacuous. ConfTriage achieved an F1 score of 88.22% and an AUC of 0.92, resolving 76.5% of cases using zero-shot LLM inference alone and referring only uncertain cases to the specialist DL backstop. These results demonstrate that clinically meaningful diagnostic information can be captured through structured radiological descriptions and leveraged by calibrated LLMs for selective referral. The framework suggests a practical pathway for combining generalist LLM prediction with specialist AI models in medical decision-support systems. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/rabiul-ai/ConfTriage.

Md Rabiul Islam, Samir Abdaljalil, Erchin Serpedin +1

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA · College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

Selective Prediction Clinical Decision Support Language Model Calibration Clinical Prediction

Aug 11, 2026cs.LG

ProbGuard: Calibrated Safety Risk Estimation from LLM Output Distributions

Recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) safety has widely adopted guardrails to identify unsafe LLM outputs. Existing guardrails typically formulate safety assessment as a deterministic classification task, mapping a discrete token sequence to a discrete safety label. However, this paradigm has two limitations: First, safety assessment is inherently an uncertain problem, particularly during the early generation state. Second, relying solely on discrete token sequences discards the rich probabilistic information embedded in the LLM output distribution. To address these limitations, we propose the first completely probabilistic architecture-agnostic guardrail \textsc{ProbGuard} to leverage the LLM early output distributional signals for estimating and calibrating the safety probability, thereby enabling early stopping of unsafe ongoing outputs. Specifically, given an LLM's generated prefix distribution, we formulate the safety risk as the unsafe probability of its continued generation dynamics and estimate this risk by Monte-Carlo sampling. Through post-training on the distributional signals and calibrated safety risk, \textsc{ProbGuard} achieves the best calibration performance across all nine model--dataset combination settings, reducing the average Brier score and ECE by 79.6% and 71.9%, respectively, over the best baseline. \textsc{ProbGuard} further limits the attack success rate to at most 1% across six representative jailbreak attacks after observing the LLM early output distributions from only the first ten decoding steps.

Xinzhe Huang, Biwu Yao, Kedong Xiu +4

State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security, Hangzhou, China · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China +3

LLM Guardrails Language Model Calibration Safety Filtering LLM Safety Evaluation LLM Uncertainty Estimation