Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty
Authors: name: Mehul Damani; name: Isha Puri; name: Stewart Slocum; name: Idan Shenfeld; name: Leshem Choshen; name: Yoon Kim; name: Jacob Andreas
Published: 2025-07-22 17:56:01

Abstract: When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to
generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a
variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful
applications of RL for reasoning use binary reward functions that evaluate the
correctness of LM outputs. Because such reward functions do not penalize
guessing or low-confidence outputs, they often have the unintended side-effect
of degrading calibration and increasing the rate at which LMs generate
incorrect responses (or "hallucinate") in other problem domains. This paper
describes RLCR (Reinforcement Learning with Calibration Rewards), an approach
to training reasoning models that jointly improves accuracy and calibrated
confidence estimation. During RLCR, LMs generate both predictions and numerical
confidence estimates after reasoning. They are trained to optimize a reward
function that augments a binary correctness score with a Brier score -- a
scoring rule for confidence estimates that incentivizes calibrated prediction.
We first prove that this reward function (or any analogous reward function that
uses a bounded, proper scoring rule) yields models whose predictions are both
accurate and well-calibrated. We next show that across diverse datasets, RLCR
substantially improves calibration with no loss in accuracy, on both in-domain
and out-of-domain evaluations -- outperforming both ordinary RL training and
classifiers trained to assign post-hoc confidence scores. While ordinary RL
hurts calibration, RLCR improves it. Finally, we demonstrate that verbalized
confidence can be leveraged at test time to improve accuracy and calibration
via confidence-weighted scaling methods. Our results show that explicitly
optimizing for calibration can produce more generally reliable reasoning
models.