Language Models Prefer What They Know: Relative Confidence Estimation
  via Confidence Preferences
Authors: name: Vaishnavi Shrivastava; name: Ananya Kumar; name: Percy Liang
Published: 2025-02-03 07:43:27

Abstract: Language models (LMs) should provide reliable confidence estimates to help
users detect mistakes in their outputs and defer to human experts when
necessary. Asking a language model to assess its confidence ("Score your
confidence from 0-1.") is a natural way of evaluating its uncertainty. However,
models struggle to provide absolute assessments of confidence (i.e. judging
confidence in answering a question independent of other questions) and the
coarse-grained scores they produce are not useful for evaluating the
correctness of their answers. We propose relative confidence estimation, where
we match up questions against each other and ask the model to make relative
judgments of confidence ("Which question are you more confident in answering
correctly?"). Treating each question as a "player" in a series of matchups
against other questions and the model's preferences as match outcomes, we can
use rank aggregation methods like Elo rating and Bradley-Terry to translate the
model's confidence preferences into confidence scores. We evaluate relative
confidence estimation against absolute confidence estimation and
self-consistency confidence methods on five state-of-the-art LMs -- GPT-4,
GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1 405B -- across 14
challenging STEM, social science, and commonsense reasoning question answering
tasks. Our results demonstrate that relative confidence estimation consistently
provides more reliable confidence scores than absolute confidence estimation,
with average gains of 3.5% in selective classification AUC over direct absolute
confidence estimation methods and 1.7% over self-consistency approaches across
all models and datasets.