Evaluating Confidence-Gated Retrieval with Matched Trajectory Replay
Interactive language-model agents use confidence signals to decide whether to answer immediately, retrieve additional evidence (from memory or external knowledge), or defer. Yet confidence is usually evaluated in isolation, without measuring the trajectory-level consequences of the actions it triggers. We propose matched trajectory replay, a controlled protocol for comparing confidence-to-action mappings. The protocol holds candidate answer states, evidence points, budgets, and action costs fixed. We use it to compare raw verbalized confidence with post-hoc isotonic calibration in a multi-hop question-answering system using Mistral, GPT, and Qwen models on HotpotQA and MuSiQue datasets. A...
| Authors | Prateek Chhikara |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
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