让大模型说真话:训练时校准自信度,推理时按信心分配算力。
Scaling with Confidence: Calibrating Confidence of LLMs for Adaptive Test Time Scaling

- 用三重奖励机制(正确性+自信度+参考准确率)提升模型自信度与真实表现的一致性。
- 在8个数据集上验证,模型准确率不降,自信度校准显著优于当前最佳方法。
- 基于校准后的自信度动态调整推理资源,最多可节省12.33倍算力。
使用强化学习训练大语言模型(LLMs)显著提升了其在推理和问答任务上的表现。然而,现有RL奖励设计多关注回答正确性,忽视了引导模型准确表达自信度。这导致性能提升常伴随自信度与准确率严重脱节,模型在不确定时过度自信、产生幻觉。为此,我们提出一种新算法C3RL,融合正确性、校准性和数据集参考准确率的奖励信号。在8个文本与多模态数据集上的综合评估表明,C3RL在不牺牲准确率的前提下显著改善校准效果,优于当前最优方法。进一步利用C3RL生成的可靠自信度,我们引入CAS策略——基于自信度的自适应推理时缩放方法,根据响应置信度动态分配计算资源。实验显示,CAS在域内与域外数据集上均超越多数投票法,同时推理预算最高降低12.33倍。我们相信C3RL与CAS的结合将推动更可靠、高效的大模型部署。代码、数据与模型将公开发布。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced their performance on reasoning and question-answering tasks. However, prevailing RL reward designs typically prioritize response correctness, neglecting to incentivize models to express their confidence accurately. This leads to a critical problem: performance gains are often accompanied by poor calibration between confidence and accuracy, misleading models to overconfidently hallucinate when uncertain. To address this limitation, we propose $\textbf{C}$orrectness and $\textbf{C}$onfidence $\textbf{C}$alibration $\textbf{R}$einforcement $\textbf{L}$earning ($\textbf{C3RL}$), a novel RL algorithm integrating correctness, calibration and dataset-informed reference accuracy rewards together. Comprehensive evaluation across 8 text and multimodal datasets demonstrates that C3RL enhances calibration without sacrificing accuracy, outperforming the current state-of-the-art method in both performance and calibration metrics. Utilizing the well-calibrated verbalized confidence from C3RL, we further introduce $\textbf{C}$onfidence-based $\textbf{A}$daptive Test Time $\textbf{S}$caling ($\textbf{CAS}$), an adjustable inference-time strategy that allocates computational resources based on response confidence. Experiments show that CAS surpasses majority voting on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets while reducing the inference budget by up to 12.33 times. We believe the synergy of C3RL and CAS paves the way for deploying more reliable and resource-efficient LLMs. The code, data and models will be released.
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