A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Models

Jiahui Geng, Fengyu Cai, Yuxia Wang, Heinz Koeppl, Preslav Nakov, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks in various domains. Despite their impressive performance, they can be unreliable due to factual errors in their generations. Assessing their confidence and calibrating them across different tasks can help mitigate risks and enable LLMs to produce better generations. There has been a lot of recent research aiming to address this, but there has been no comprehensive overview to organize it and to outline the main lessons learned. The present survey aims to bridge this gap. In particular, we outline the challenges and we summarize recent technical advancements for LLM confidence estimation and calibration. We further discuss their applications and suggest promising directions for future work.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.366
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6577–6595
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.366
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiahui Geng, Fengyu Cai, Yuxia Wang, Heinz Koeppl, Preslav Nakov, and Iryna Gurevych. 2024. A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6577–6595, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Models (Geng et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.366.pdf
Copyright:
 2024.naacl-long.366.copyright.pdf