Probability is Not Enough: Exploring and Counting Divergent Tokens for Reasoning Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs
As the chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities of large language models improve, evaluating and calibrating their reasoning confidence is becoming increasingly important for quantifying the uncertainty of their answers. Current methods for estimating the confidence of large language models are generally based on probabilities of selected key tokens, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Our pilot study finds that replacing selected token probabilities with coarse substitutes can also improve calibration, motivating us to further explore effective signals of model confidence. We introduce Divergent Token Confidence (DTC), a framework that estimates confidence by counting tokens at ...
| Authors | Feiyang Li, Shengjing Liu, Qi Zhan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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