让大模型学会在不确定时主动放弃回答,提升回答准确性。
I-CALM: Incentivizing Confidence-Aware Abstention for LLM Selective Answering

- 通过提示工程引导模型表达自信程度并选择是否作答。
- 在多个数据集上降低错误回答率,同时提高拒绝回答的质量。
- 无需重训练,适合希望改进模型决策能力的研究者和开发者。
大型语言模型常在缺乏依据时仍给出自信但错误的答案,部分原因在于标准评估机制鼓励猜测而非表达不确定性。本文研究可验证答案的事实性问题中的认知性拒答,目标是提升选择性回答能力:让模型在可能出错时选择不回答,同时保留正确回答。受人类答题行为启发,提出I-CALM框架——一种针对黑箱大模型的提示级方法,结合口头自信度提取、回答/拒答的奖励设置及强调诚实、谦逊、证据支持与责任的规范引导。为区分有目的拒答与盲目拒绝,采用两阶段评估:先决定答或不答,再强制对拒答样本给出最佳猜测。实验显示,I-CALM在多种模型和事实问答数据集上均有效降低表面回答的错误率,提升拒答质量,将易错情况转入拒答,同时保留原能正确回答的样本。整体上,I-CALM提供了一种无需微调或访问内部状态的轻量级推理时选择性回答优化方案。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident but incorrect answers, in part because standard evaluation incentives reward guessing over expressing uncertainty. We study epistemic abstention for factual questions with verifiable answers, where the goal is to improve selective answering, making LLMs abstain when they are likely to be wrong while preserving correct answers. Inspired by human behavioral decisions in question answering, we introduce I-CALM, a prompt-level framework for black-box LLMs. I-CALM combines elicited verbal confidence, announced answer/abstain payoffs, and normative guidance emphasizing truthfulness, humility, evidential support, and responsibility. To distinguish targeted abstention from indiscriminate refusal, we use a two-stage evaluation protocol, in which LLMs first choose whether to answer or abstain, and are then forced to provide a best guess for the abstained ones. Across models and factual QA datasets, I-CALM improves selective answering by reducing false-answer rate among surfaced responses and improving abstention quality, shifting error-prone cases into abstention while retaining answers the model would have answered correctly. Overall, I-CALM offers a lightweight way to improve inference-time selective answering without retraining or access to model's internal states. Code is available at https://github.com/FayLONG03/hallucinationControl.
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