让大模型自己判断评分可信度,高信度自动通过,低信度交给人审。
When Can We Trust LLM Graders? Calibrating Confidence for Automated Assessment
- 让大模型自评信心值,比多轮投票更准且省计算
- 120B参数模型信心预测最准,平均误差仅0.100
- 信心值分布偏斜,设阈值时要留出安全余量
大型语言模型在自动评分中展现潜力,但其输出可能不可靠。本文不直接提升评分准确率,而是解决关键问题:预测大模型评分何时可信。这使得高置信度结果可自动处理,低置信度则标记人工审查。我们在七种不同规模(40亿至1200亿参数)的模型上,对比三种置信度估计方法(自报信心、自一致性投票、词元概率),测试于三个教育数据集:RiceChem(化学长答案)、SciEntsBank 和 Beetle(科学短答案)。实验表明,自报信心在所有条件下均表现最优,平均期望校准误差(ECE)为0.166,优于自一致性方法的0.229;尽管自一致性需五倍推理成本,仍差38%。更大模型显著提升校准效果,收益因数据集和方法而异(如自报信心下ECE降低28%);其中GPT-OSS-120B表现最佳,平均ECE为0.100,判别能力(AUC)达0.668。此外,所有方法均显示信心值高度右偏,形成“信心底限”,使用者设阈值时须注意。研究说明,仅让模型自评信心即是一种实用可靠的自动化评分策略。代码已公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for automated grading, but their outputs can be unreliable. Rather than improving grading accuracy directly, we address a complementary problem: \textit{predicting when an LLM grader is likely to be correct}. This enables selective automation where high-confidence predictions are processed automatically while uncertain cases are flagged for human review. We compare three confidence estimation methods (self-reported confidence, self-consistency voting, and token probability) across seven LLMs of varying scale (4B to 120B parameters) on three educational datasets: RiceChem (long-answer chemistry), SciEntsBank, and Beetle (short-answer science). Our experiments reveal that self-reported confidence consistently achieves the best calibration across all conditions (avg ECE 0.166 vs 0.229 for self-consistency). Surprisingly, self-consistency remains 38\% worse despite requiring 5$\times$ the inference cost. Larger models exhibit substantially better calibration though gains vary by dataset and method (e.g., a 28\% ECE reduction for self-reported), with GPT-OSS-120B achieving the best calibration (avg ECE 0.100) and strong discrimination (avg AUC 0.668). We also observe that confidence is strongly top-skewed across methods, creating a ``confidence floor'' that practitioners must account for when setting thresholds. These findings suggest that simply asking LLMs to report their confidence provides a practical approach for identifying reliable grading predictions. Code is available \href{https://github.com/sonkar-lab/llm_grading_calibration}{here}.
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