From token probabilities to calibrated confidence: An empirical study of mathematical question answering
Confidence estimation for large language models (LLMs) aims to estimate the probability that a generated answer is correct, while calibration aligns these estimates with empirical accuracy. Prior work has shown that token probabilities are often overconfident, we investigate whether these readily available signals can nevertheless provide well-calibrated confidence estimation for mathematical question answering. We compare single-pass estimators, which reuse token probabilities from the original generation, with multi-pass estimators, which obtain additional confidence signals through verification or stochastic forward passes. While individual token probabilities can be highly saturated, ...
| Authors | Avery Ma, Lorne Schell, Vin Bhaskara et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 8 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.