An Analysis of Training-Free Self-Reported Confidence in Language Models
Large language models can report a numerical confidence together with generated content, but it is unclear whether this report is more than…
Why am I seeing this Ranked on source trust — arXiv
It ranks mainly on source trust: arXiv is the most reliable outlet we track on this subject, and is the only one on the story so far.
The classifier could not identify the subject from the text, so the section was inherited from the source feed. We do not summarise what we cannot identify — this one links straight out.
Link-outLink-out, because the subject could not be identified from the text. Link-out means we point at the publisher and say nothing of our own.
| Factor | Weight | Score | Contribution | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corroboration | 0.35 | 0.39 | +0.135 26% | 1 independent org on the story. Tier-3 aggregators never corroborate — they can show something is circulating, never that it is true. |
| Source trustleads | 0.25 | 0.85 | +0.212 41% | arXiv is the highest-trust source on this story and is first-party — the organisation announcing its own news. Trust is taken from the best source, not averaged. |
| Pickup rate | 0.20 | 0.00 | +0.000 0% | One counted organisation, so there is no spread to measure — nothing has picked this up to set a rate. |
| Freshness | 0.20 | 0.85 | +0.171 33% | Halves every 10 hours from the newest item on the story. This is the only factor that rewards a story for nothing more than being recent. |
Corroboration counts distinct organisations, once each, and only from tiers 1 and 2. Freshness halves every 10 hours, so this ranking is a snapshot and will differ at the next build.
What happened
Large language models can report a numerical confidence together with generated content, but it is unclear whether this report is more than calibrated rhetoric. We analyze three training-free signals: confidence verbalized with the answer, post-hoc $P(\mathrm{True})$, and agreement with three additional generations on the same 100 TriviaQA questions for two model families. Direct verbalization is a surprisingly strong baseline: after auditing benchmark errors, it reaches AUROC 0.956 and 0.937 for correctness prediction. Three-sample agreement is substantially weaker (0.765 and 0.790), and a fixed interpolation with verbalized confidence has no statistically reliable benefit.
How this story arrived
Ordered by when each source was first observed, which is what the velocity figure is computed from. Publishers backdate; observed order does not.
- 01 Arxivfirst-party first seen An Analysis of Training-Free Self-Reported Confidence in Language Models
Overclock clusters coverage from independent sources and grades it automatically. The figures above are computed, not editorial. This page summarises and links to reporting by the outlets named — follow the links for the original work.