Bingxu Han


2025

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SafeConf: A Confidence-Calibrated Safety Self-Evaluation Method for Large Language Models
Bo Zhang | Cong Gao | Linkang Yang | Bingxu Han | Minghao Hu | Zhunchen Luo | Guotong Geng | Xiaoying Bai | Jun Zhang | Wen Yao | Zhong Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved groundbreaking progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite the numerous advantages of LLMs, they also pose significant safety risks. Self-evaluation mechanisms have gained increasing attention as a key safeguard to ensure safe and controllable content generation. However, LLMs often exhibit overconfidence, which seriously compromises the accuracy of safety self-evaluation. To address this challenge, we propose SafeConf, a method to enhance the safety self-evaluation capability of LLMs through confidence calibration. The method performs semantic mutations on the original safety evaluation questions and adopts a self-consistency strategy to quantify confidence based on answer accuracy on the mutated questions. Finally, these confidence scores are used to construct a dataset for fine-tuning. We conducte experiments on both Chinese and English datasets. The results show that SafeConf improves self-evaluation accuracy by an average of 5.86% and 7.79% over the state-of-the-art baseline methods on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama3-8B-Instruct models, respectively, without affecting the general capabilities of the models.