让大模型说话时自带可信度,避免盲目自信。
ConfTuner: Training Large Language Models to Express Their Confidence Verbally
- 用新损失函数训练模型,让其自然说出真实把握度。
- 在多种推理任务中显著提升信心表达准确性。
- 适合需要高可信度的医疗、法律等关键场景使用。
大型语言模型在科学、法律、医疗等高风险领域应用日益广泛,准确表达不确定性对可靠性与信任至关重要。然而当前模型常以高信心输出错误答案,即“过度自信”问题。现有方法依赖提示工程或启发式生成的置信度估计,效果有限且泛化性差。本文提出 ConfTuner,一种简单高效的微调方法,不需真实置信度标签或代理估计,仅通过新的分词版布里尔分数(tokenized Brier score)损失函数实现。该损失函数理论上为合理评分规则,能正确激励模型报告真实正确概率。ConfTuner 在多种推理任务中显著改善校准性能,并可推广至 GPT-4o 等黑箱模型。实验还表明,更准确的信心表达可提升自纠错与模型级联的下游表现,推动可信 LLM 系统发展。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as science, law, and healthcare, where accurate expressions of uncertainty are essential for reliability and trust. However, current LLMs are often observed to generate incorrect answers with high confidence, a phenomenon known as "overconfidence". Recent efforts have focused on calibrating LLMs' verbalized confidence: i.e., their expressions of confidence in text form, such as "I am 80% confident that...". Existing approaches either rely on prompt engineering or fine-tuning with heuristically generated uncertainty estimates, both of which have limited effectiveness and generalizability. Motivated by the notion of proper scoring rules for calibration in classical machine learning models, we introduce ConfTuner, a simple and efficient fine-tuning method that introduces minimal overhead and does not require ground-truth confidence scores or proxy confidence estimates. ConfTuner relies on a new loss function, tokenized Brier score, which we theoretically prove to be a proper scoring rule, intuitively meaning that it "correctly incentivizes the model to report its true probability of being correct". ConfTuner improves calibration across diverse reasoning tasks and generalizes to black-box models such as GPT-4o. Our results further show that better-calibrated confidence enables downstream gains in self-correction and model cascade, advancing the development of trustworthy LLM systems. The code is available at https://github.com/liushiliushi/ConfTuner.
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