Are You Sure You're Sure? On the Impact of Instruction Tuning on Confidence and Lexical Diversity
Instruction-tuned language models achieve strong performance across a range of generation tasks but have recently been shown to exhibit verbalized overconfidence, which may manifest in less diverse supporting rationales for incorrect answers. However, whether such overconfidence is associated with rationale consistency remains an open question. In this paper, we study whether changes in the lexical diversity of generated answer rationales accompany changes in model confidence induced by instruction tuning. We evaluate three matched base and instruction-tuned models across question-answering benchmarks and find that instruction tuning consistently increases answer confidence, despite limit...
| Authors | Irina Proskurina, Mayank Kumar, Oyindolapo O. Komolafe |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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