arXiv:2511.06437cs.AIcs.CL2025-11被引 2

通过几何与概率分析,让大模型推理时更准确判断自己对错。

Optimizing Chain-of-Thought Confidence via Topological and Dirichlet Risk Analysis

  • 用拓扑结构分析多步推理路径的几何特征,量化不确定性。
  • 在数学和常识推理任务中,误差率降低41%,关键任务零错误。
  • 适合需要高可靠性推理的场景,如考试答题或金融预测。

链式思维(CoT)提示使大语言模型能解决复杂问题,但安全部署需可靠的置信度估计,现有方法存在校准差和错误预测时严重过度自信的问题。我们提出增强狄利克雷与拓扑风险(EDTR)解码策略,结合拓扑分析与基于狄利克雷的不确定性量化,衡量模型在多条推理路径中的置信度。EDTR将每条CoT视为高维空间中的向量,提取8个拓扑风险特征,捕捉推理分布的几何结构:聚类紧密、一致的路径表示高置信度,分散不一致则表明不确定性。我们在四个多样化推理基准上评估了EDTR,涵盖奥数级数学(AIME)、小学数学(GSM8K)、常识推理和股价预测。相较于三种先进校准方法,EDTR实现41%更好的校准效果,平均ECE为0.287,综合得分最高达0.672;在AIME任务中达到完美准确率,在GSM8K上表现卓越,ECE仅为0.107,而基线方法在此类任务中出现严重过自信。本工作为理解与量化多步大模型推理的不确定性提供了几何框架,支持在置信度至关重要场景下的可靠部署。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables Large Language Models to solve complex problems, but deploying these models safely requires reliable confidence estimates, a capability where existing methods suffer from poor calibration and severe overconfidence on incorrect predictions. We propose Enhanced Dirichlet and Topology Risk (EDTR), a novel decoding strategy that combines topological analysis with Dirichlet-based uncertainty quantification to measure LLM confidence across multiple reasoning paths. EDTR treats each CoT as a vector in high-dimensional space and extracts eight topological risk features capturing the geometric structure of reasoning distributions: tighter, more coherent clusters indicate higher confidence while dispersed, inconsistent paths signal uncertainty. We evaluate EDTR against three state-of-the-art calibration methods across four diverse reasoning benchmarks spanning olympiad-level mathematics (AIME), grade school math (GSM8K), commonsense reasoning, and stock price prediction \cite{zhang2025aime, cobbe2021training, talmor-etal-2019-commonsenseqa, yahoo_finance}. EDTR achieves 41\% better calibration than competing methods with an average ECE of 0.287 and the best overall composite score of 0.672, while notably achieving perfect accuracy on AIME and exceptional calibration on GSM8K with an ECE of 0.107, domains where baselines exhibit severe overconfidence. Our work provides a geometric framework for understanding and quantifying uncertainty in multi-step LLM reasoning, enabling more reliable deployment where calibrated confidence estimates are essential.

链式思维置信度校准不确定性量化大模型推理

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