AI RESEARCH
ADVICE: Answer-Dependent Verbalized Confidence Estimation
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2510.10913v3 Announce Type: replace Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled them to communicate their confidence in natural language, improving transparency and reliability. However, this expressiveness is often accompanied by systematic overconfidence, whose underlying causes remain poorly understood. In this work, we analyze the dynamics of verbalized confidence estimation and identify answer-independence -- the failure to condition confidence on the model's own answer -- as a primary driver of this behavior. To address this, we