Can LLMs Use Linguistic Uncertainty Markers to Reliably Reflect Intrinsic Confidence?
LLMs' linguistically expressed confidence should faithfully reflect their intrinsic uncertainty. While recent work shows LLMs struggle to use epistemic markers (e.g., "it is likely...") in a human-aligned fashion, it remains unclear whether models can apply their own linguistic confidence framework to associate markers with specific confidence levels in a stable and generalizable way, and how contextual features impact this ability. We conduct the first systematic study of this question, formalizing _marker internal confidence_ (MIC) as the estimated intrinsic confidence a model associates with a specific epistemic marker in a given task domain. We present 7 metrics to evaluate the stabil...
| Authors | Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu, Arman Cohan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 May 2026 |
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