Different Facets of Verbalised Overconfidence: an Interpretability Study
Large language models tend to overconfidence, giving assertive answers when the evidence suggests hedging or abstention. Using controlled reasoning scenarios that manipulate logical necessity and possibility, we study this behavior in Qwen3-4B, across three ways to express uncertainty: verbal epistemic markers, abstention, and numeric confidence scores. Our results confirm this tendency toward overconfidence, particularly when the model is prompted to output a numeric confidence score. At the interpretability level, we propose a method that differentially identifies transcoder features responsible for uncertainty and certainty. Our analysis reveals Qwen3-4B's default mechanism favors cert...
| Authors | Davide Mazzaccara, Leonardo Bertolazzi, Raffaella Bernardi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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