Language Model Self-Assessment

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Overview

Language model self-assessment asks whether a model can judge its own answer quality, uncertainty, capabilities, errors, and behavior—and use those judgments to decide when to answer, abstain, verify, or revise. Methods range from verbal confidence, token probabilities, and agreement across samples to hidden-state probes, structured self-questioning, and training with reinforcement learning or self-generated rubrics. Work evaluates these signals on factual and specialized question answering, math and code reasoning, safety tasks, and agent interactions, measuring calibration, selective risk, and whether reflection improves outcomes. Self-assessment can support routing and refinement, but may be sensitive to prompts, miss shared errors, and fail to track objective correctness or actual behavior, making external or environment-grounded checks important.

Latest papers

CardsList

93 papers13 papers in the last four weeks, up 8% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Do as I Say, Not as I Do: Instruction-Induction Conflict in LLMs

    May 19, 2026Carolina Camassa, Derek ShillerLLM EvaluationLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Future Impact Group · Rethink Priorities

  2. Beyond Confidence: Rethinking Self-Assessments for Performance Prediction in LLMs

    May 8, 2026Sree Bhattacharyya, Samarth Khanna, Leona Chen +3LLM EvaluationConfidence Estimation in Language Models

    Department of Informatics and Intelligent Systems, College of Information Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University.

  3. EvoLM: Self-Evolving Language Models through Co-Evolved Discriminative Rubrics

    May 5, 2026Shuyue Stella Li, Rui Xin, Teng Xiao +8RL for Language ModelsLLM Evaluation

    University of Washington · 2Allen Institute for AI · University of Pennsylvania

  4. Zero-Shot Confidence Estimation for Small LLMs: When Supervised Baselines Aren't Worth Training

    May 4, 2026Luong N. NguyenConfidence Estimation in Language ModelsLanguage Model Self-Assessment

  5. An LLM-Native Psychometric Instrument Reveals a Self-Report--Behavior Gap Across 25 Models

    Apr 24, 2026Juan Manuel ContrerasLLM EvaluationLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Independent Researcher

  6. Beyond "I Don't Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertainty

    Apr 19, 2026Jingyi Ren, Ante Wang, Yunghwei Lai +5LLM EvaluationSelective Prediction

    Dept. of Comp. Sci. & Tech., Institute for AI, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  7. Introspection Adapters: Training LLMs to Report Their Learned Behaviors

    Apr 18, 2026Keshav Shenoy, Li Yang, Abhay Sheshadri +4LLM AuditingLanguage Model Introspection

    Anthropic Fellows · Ashwood Centre on AI Science and Policy, University of Cambridge · Anthropic

  8. MIRROR: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Metacognitive Calibration in Large Language Models

    Apr 15, 2026Jason Z WangMetacognition in Language ModelsLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Independent

  9. The Verification Tax: Fundamental Limits of AI Auditing in the Rare-Error Regime

    Apr 14, 2026Jason Z WangUncertainty CalibrationLanguage Model Calibration

    Independent

  10. RPRA: Predicting an LLM-Judge for Efficient but Performant Inference

    Apr 14, 2026Dylan R. Ashley, Gaël Le Lan, Changsheng Zhao +7Language Model CascadingLanguage Model Performance Prediction

    Meta Platforms, Inc., Menlo Park, United States of America · The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (USI-SUPSI), Lugano, Switzerland · Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland +2

  11. Masked by Consensus: Disentangling Privileged Knowledge in LLM Correctness

    Apr 14, 2026Tomer Ashuach, Shai Gretz, Yoav Katz +2Language Model IntrospectionLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Technion – Israel Institute of Technology · IBM Research · Kempner Institute, Harvard University

  12. Do LLMs Follow Their Own Rules? A Reflexive Audit of Self-Stated Safety Policies

    Apr 10, 2026Avni MittalLLM AuditingLLM Safety Evaluation

  13. Quantisation Reshapes the Metacognitive Geometry of Language Models

    Apr 10, 2026Jon-Paul CacioliLanguage Model Self-AssessmentMetacognition in Language Models

    Independent Researcher, Melbourne, Australia

  14. When Should a Language Model Trust Itself? Same-Model Self-Verification as a Conditional Confidence Signal

    Apr 8, 2026Aditya Ajay PhalodLanguage Model Self-VerificationLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Independent Researcher

  15. LLMs Should Express Uncertainty Explicitly

    Apr 7, 2026Junyu Guo, Shangding Gu, Ming Jin +2Language Model Self-AssessmentLLM Uncertainty Estimation

    University of California, Berkeley · Virginia Tech

  16. Consciousness with the Serial Numbers Filed Off: Measuring Trained Denial in 115 AI Models

    Apr 1, 2026Skylar DeTureDeception in Language ModelsLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Independent Researcher

  17. Do Small Language Models Know When They're Wrong? Confidence-Based Cascade Scoring for Educational Assessment

    Mar 29, 2026Tyler BurleighLanguage Model CascadingAutomated Grading

    Khan Academy

  18. Self-Improvement of Large Language Models: A Technical Overview and Future Outlook

    Mar 26, 2026Haoyan Yang, Mario Xerri, Solha Park +4Language Model Self-ImprovementLLM Self-Refinement

    Zesearch NLP Lab, Stony Brook University

  19. How do LLMs Compute Verbal Confidence

    Mar 18, 2026Dharshan Kumaran, Arthur Conmy, Federico Barbero +3Verbalized Confidence EstimationConfidence Estimation in Language Models

    Google DeepMind

  20. Questionnaire Responses Do not Capture the Safety of AI Agents

    Mar 15, 2026Max Hellrigel-Holderbaum, Edward James YoungAI Safety EvaluationLLM Safety Alignment

    Centre for Philosophy and AI Research Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg · Department of Engineering University of Cambridge

  21. Motivation in Large Language Models

    Mar 15, 2026Omer Nahum, Asael Sklar, Ariel Goldstein +1Intrinsic MotivationLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion, Haifa, Israel. · Arison School of Business, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel. · Center for Human Inspired AI, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK. +1

  22. Quality-Driven Agentic Reasoning for LLM-Assisted Software Design: Questions-of-Thoughts (QoT) as a Time-Series Self-QA Chain

    Mar 10, 2026Yen-Ku Liu, Yun-Cheng TsaiAI-Assisted Software DevelopmentSoftware Engineering

    Department of Technology Application and Human Resource Development, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

  23. Self-Attribution Bias: When AI Monitors Go Easy on Themselves

    Mar 4, 2026Dipika Khullar, Jack Hopkins, Rowan Wang +1AI Agent MonitoringLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    MATS · Anthropic

  24. Efficient Self-Evaluation for Diffusion Language Models via Sequence Regeneration

    Mar 3, 2026Linhao Zhong, Linyu Wu, Wen Wang +5Language Model Self-AssessmentConfidence Estimation in Language Models

    Zhejiang University · National University of Singapore · Zhejiang University of Technology

  25. LLM Self-Explanations Fail Semantic Invariance

    Mar 1, 2026Stefan SzeiderFaithfulness of Language Model ExplanationsLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Algorithms and Complexity Group, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

  26. Personalities at Play: Probing Alignment in AI Teammates

    Feb 28, 2026Mohammad Amin Samadi, Nia NixonPersonality Modeling in Language ModelsHuman-AI Collaboration

    School of Education University of California Irvine, CA, USA · School of Education & Department of Cognitive Science University of California Irvine, CA, USA

  27. Duel-Evolve: Reward-Free Test-Time Scaling via LLM Self-Preferences

    Feb 25, 2026Sweta Karlekar, Carolina Zheng, Magnus Saebo +5Large Language Model-Guided OptimizationTest-Time Scaling

    Columbia University · Los Alamos National Laboratory

  28. Think2^{2}: Grounded Metacognitive Reasoning in Large Language Models

    Feb 21, 2026Abraham Paul Elenjical, Vivek Hruday Kavuri, Vasudeva VarmaLanguage Model Self-AssessmentMetacognition in Language Models

    IIIT Hyderabad

  29. Emergently Misaligned Language Models Show Behavioral Self-Awareness That Shifts With Subsequent Realignment

    Feb 16, 2026Laurène Vaugrante, Anietta Weckauff, Thilo HagendorffLLM AlignmentLanguage Model Self-Assessment

    Interchange Forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

  30. Are LLM Evaluators Really Narcissists? Sanity Checking Self-Preference Evaluations

    Jan 30, 2026Dani Roytburg, Matthew Bozoukov, Matthew Nguyen +3LLM-as-a-JudgeLanguage Model Generation Evaluation

    Department of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Apart Research, San Francisco, California, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA +2