@inproceedings{radharapu-etal-2026-calibrating,
title = "Calibrating {LLM} Judges: Linear Probes for Fast and Reliable Uncertainty Estimation",
author = "Radharapu, Bhaktipriya and
Saxena, Eshika and
Li, Kenneth and
Whitehouse, Chenxi and
Williams, Adina and
Cancedda, Nicola",
editor = "Li, Yunyao and
Rehm, Georg and
Tu, Mei",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics ({ACL} 2026)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-industry.14/",
pages = "193--216",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-394-4",
abstract = "As LLM-based judges become integral to industry applications, obtaining well-calibrated uncertainty estimates efficiently has become critical for production deployment. However, existing techniques, such as verbalized confidence and multi-generation methods, are often either poorly calibrated or computationally expensive. We introduce linear probes trained with a Brier score-based loss to provide calibrated uncertainty estimates from reasoning judges' hidden states, requiring no additional model training. We evaluate our approach on both objective tasks (reasoning, mathematics, factuality, coding) and subjective human preference judgments. Our results demonstrate that probes achieve superior calibration compared to existing methods with x computational savings, generalize robustly to unseen evaluation domains, and deliver higher accuracy on high-confidence predictions. However, probes produce conservative estimates that underperform on easier datasets but may benefit safety-critical deployments prioritizing low false-positive rates. Overall, our work demonstrates that interpretability-based uncertainty estimation provides a practical and scalable plug-and-play solution for LLM judges in production."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="radharapu-etal-2026-calibrating">
<titleInfo>
<title>Calibrating LLM Judges: Linear Probes for Fast and Reliable Uncertainty Estimation</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Bhaktipriya</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Radharapu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Eshika</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Saxena</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kenneth</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Chenxi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Whitehouse</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Adina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Williams</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Nicola</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Cancedda</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yunyao</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Georg</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Rehm</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mei</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, USA</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-394-4</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>As LLM-based judges become integral to industry applications, obtaining well-calibrated uncertainty estimates efficiently has become critical for production deployment. However, existing techniques, such as verbalized confidence and multi-generation methods, are often either poorly calibrated or computationally expensive. We introduce linear probes trained with a Brier score-based loss to provide calibrated uncertainty estimates from reasoning judges’ hidden states, requiring no additional model training. We evaluate our approach on both objective tasks (reasoning, mathematics, factuality, coding) and subjective human preference judgments. Our results demonstrate that probes achieve superior calibration compared to existing methods with x computational savings, generalize robustly to unseen evaluation domains, and deliver higher accuracy on high-confidence predictions. However, probes produce conservative estimates that underperform on easier datasets but may benefit safety-critical deployments prioritizing low false-positive rates. Overall, our work demonstrates that interpretability-based uncertainty estimation provides a practical and scalable plug-and-play solution for LLM judges in production.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">radharapu-etal-2026-calibrating</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-industry.14/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>193</start>
<end>216</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Calibrating LLM Judges: Linear Probes for Fast and Reliable Uncertainty Estimation
%A Radharapu, Bhaktipriya
%A Saxena, Eshika
%A Li, Kenneth
%A Whitehouse, Chenxi
%A Williams, Adina
%A Cancedda, Nicola
%Y Li, Yunyao
%Y Rehm, Georg
%Y Tu, Mei
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-394-4
%F radharapu-etal-2026-calibrating
%X As LLM-based judges become integral to industry applications, obtaining well-calibrated uncertainty estimates efficiently has become critical for production deployment. However, existing techniques, such as verbalized confidence and multi-generation methods, are often either poorly calibrated or computationally expensive. We introduce linear probes trained with a Brier score-based loss to provide calibrated uncertainty estimates from reasoning judges’ hidden states, requiring no additional model training. We evaluate our approach on both objective tasks (reasoning, mathematics, factuality, coding) and subjective human preference judgments. Our results demonstrate that probes achieve superior calibration compared to existing methods with x computational savings, generalize robustly to unseen evaluation domains, and deliver higher accuracy on high-confidence predictions. However, probes produce conservative estimates that underperform on easier datasets but may benefit safety-critical deployments prioritizing low false-positive rates. Overall, our work demonstrates that interpretability-based uncertainty estimation provides a practical and scalable plug-and-play solution for LLM judges in production.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-industry.14/
%P 193-216
Markdown (Informal)
[Calibrating LLM Judges: Linear Probes for Fast and Reliable Uncertainty Estimation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-industry.14/) (Radharapu et al., ACL 2026)
ACL