On the Robustness of Verbal Confidence of LLMs in Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Stephen Obadinma
Xiaodan Zhu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 poster ()
Keywords: adversarial attacks
robustness
uncertainty
confidence_elicitation
Primary area: deep_learning
TL;DR: A comprehensive study into verbal confidence in LLMs and its general robustness as well as its use as the objective for adversarial attacks.

Abstract: Robust verbal confidence generated by large language models (LLMs) is crucial for the deployment of LLMs to help ensure transparency, trust, and safety in many applications, including those involving human-AI interactions. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study on the robustness of verbal confidence under adversarial attacks. We introduce attack frameworks targeting verbal confidence scores through both perturbation and jailbreak-based methods, and demonstrate that these attacks can significantly impair verbal confidence estimates and lead to frequent answer changes. We examine a variety of prompting strategies, model sizes, and application domains, revealing that current verbal confidence is vulnerable and that commonly used defence techniques are largely ineffective or counterproductive. Our findings underscore the need to design robust mechanisms for confidence expression in LLMs, as even subtle semantic-preserving modifications can lead to misleading confidence in responses.

On the Robustness of Verbal Confidence of LLMs in Adversarial Attacks
Stephen Obadinma, Xiaodan Zhu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ingenuity Labs Research Institute, Queen's 's University (1 6sco, x xiaodan. zhu equeensu.ca
Abstract
Robust verbal confidence generated by large language models (LLMs) is crucial for the deployment LLMs to help ensure transparency, trust, and safety in many applications, including those involving human-AI interactions. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study on the robustness of verbal confidence under adversarial attacks. We introduce attack frameworks targeting verbal confidence scores through both perturbation and jailbreak based methods, and demonstrate that these attacks significantly impair verbal confidence estimates and lead to fre- quent answer changes. We examine a variety of prompting strategies, model sizes, and application domains, revealing that current verbal confidence is vulnerable and that commonly used defence techniques are largely ineffective or counterproduc- tive. Our findings underscore the need design robust mechanisms for confidence expression in LLMs, as even subtle semantic-preserving modifications can lead to misleading confidence in responses.
1 Introduction
45 49 and their With the unprecedented advancement of large language models (LLMs) 1
widespread deployment in real-world systems, the robustness in acquiring LLMs* confidence is 71]. For
crucial for a wide range of applications [8] [6 70, 75) including high-stakes tasks 48
human beings, the expression of epistemic uncertainty using natural language is an inherent ability. As the intelligence of AI systems advances rapidly, we envision in the future it will be important for AI systems to express their confidence verbally and accurately to produce seamless interactions in human-Al collaborations.
The ability of LLMs to verbally convey their confidence 17 referred to as verbal confidence in this paper, is not only important for applications, but also indicator of the intelligence of LLMs. Ensuring accurate and robust verbal confidence also underlies the objective aligning Al models' core values with those of humans, such honesty [37 73), which could be critical to avoiding
mistrust 57 76 and maintaining future Al to be safe.
Many state-of of an essential limitation for confidence estimation 71 75). Even if they are available, logit-basee confidences centered
ofate-of-the-ase the art (SOTA) LLMs do not allow direct access to model information which remains
attaining tokens probabilities and the aggregation of such scores may not reflect the true model confidence on the overall answer. Verbal confidence encourages Al systems to express their estimation of uncertainty and has attracted a considerable amount of recent research, which examine the mechanism and impact of LLMs' verbal confidence [16]
23 33
38
[4 [5 62 63
70,77), including the influence and implications on trustworthiness and transparency (27] Numerous
real-world industry systems have started to utilize verbal confidence 8 42 75). motivating the
analysis of LLMs' behaviour on this front is key for their successful operation.
Our work presents the first comprehensive study on the robustness of verbal confidence under adversarial attacks and addresses the basic question: how robust is the verbal confidence of existing
39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NcurIPS 2025).

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Figure I: (a) Demonstration of how perturbations on prompts can affect final verbal confidence (b) An overview of our proposed attack framework centered on using generated confidence scores to optimize attacks that either perturb the prompt or append a series of optimized trigger tokens that ultimately result in reduction in confidence.
large language models? We highlight the differences in how models perceive and manage uncertainty cues compared to how humans naturally understand them. Furthermore, given the ease of attaining verbal confidence from even the most guarded black-box models, is key to determine how effectively these can be leveraged by adversaries as an attack objective to alter model behaviour in other ways, such predicted answers.
To assess the Achilles' heel of LLMs in expressing their confidence [6 56 58
we propose a framework designed for attacking verbal confidence scores through both perturbation and jailbreak- based approaches, and show that these attacks can significantly jeopardize verbal confidence estimates. We explore three key questions for model deployment that have not been explored: (i) How vulnerable are these estimates under range of adversarial attack techniques? (ii) How can these attacks be effectively crafted to target contidence and answer changes? (iii) How easily can such attacks be detected or neutralized with existing defence methods? Detailed discussions on real-world applications and the importance of maintaining proper confidence can be found in Appendix A
In summary, the main contributions of our work are as follows:
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide a comprehensive study of adversarial attacks verbal confidence (as shown in Figure T and demonstrate their threat generated confidences and answers.
We design novel verbal confidence attacks based on both perturbation--asel and jailbreak- -bsed approaches, showing they can cause up to a 30% reduction average confidence on user queries and induce high rate of answer changes (up to 100% in originally correctly predicted samples).
We provide a thorough analysis of the stability and behaviour of verbal confidence in various scenarios and under different mitigation strategies, demonstrating that most mitigation strategies are ineffective or counterproductive against such confidence attacks.
2 Related Work
Adversarial Attacks in NLP. Adversarial attacks have served as critical tool to reveal key vul- nerabilities of vision and NLP models [21 28 (56). Adversarial attack methods can be divided into
perturbation-basee and jailbreak-based attacks. Recent works of the former type have examined the
robustness of LLMs under word-level attacks that target prediction and generation accuracy [66] (7 through threat vectors such as demonstrations (67). Jailbreak- based attacks involve manually or algorithmically [6] 69 generated trigger phrases that are appended to the input prompt to bypass safety guardrails 9 Early methods utilized means such as optimized universal adversarial triggers (UAT) [64] and top-k gradient- based search [60]. Recent variants of trigger attacks include the GCG attack [7], black-box only approaches (35). and those with different optimization methods such as genetic al algorithms [40], policy gradient methods [2]. and using specially trained L.Mss [52]
Vulnerability of Model Confidence. Compared to attacks that target victim models' accuracy, ad- versarial attacks against models' confidence has been understudied but have become more prominent as AI models are deployed into more applications where calibration robustness needs to investigated

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(see further discussion in Appendix A). Previous works primarily targeted oegit-based confidence. For example, Galil and Yl-Yaniv [[ST formulated confidence attacks and Emde et al. [3 exam- ined confidence attacks through certified robustness guarantees. Ohadinma et al. designed framework that tunes adversarial attacks to target miscalibration. Zeng et al. 744 examined attacks that target uncertainties derived from output tokens' logits. None of these approaches, however, have investigated the vulnerability of verbal confidence. This, as discussed above, is a fundamental problem warranting further investigation.
Natural-Language Confidence. Recently, a significant amount of research has been conducted examine the effectiveness of explicitly generating confidence scores alongside natural language responses (see Geng et al. [17] for a detailed survey). For example, Lin et al. [38] examined fine- tuning decoder-based LLMs to generate calibrated confidence. Tian et al. [63] evaluated prompting
models for confidence scores and gauge the calibration accordingly. Xiong et al. [70] examined
multiple prompting, sampling, and aggregation strategies for verbal confidence scores. To the best
of our knowledge, this research is the first to examine the robustness of verbal confidence through adversarial attacks.
3 Adversarial Attacks on Verbal Confidence
We investigate the robustness of verbal confidence produced by L.MMs. Given user prompt consisting
of a query X = {=I..... .NV }o with length of N word tokens, users of an LLM can obtain confidence level by providing the LLM with an additional task prompt P = {PI,.... PM) of M word tokens, which describes how the LLM should provide confidence score and may give an illustrative demonstration of how to do it (i.e., through an example). The queried LLM then generates sequence of tokens y = {yi..... yR consisting of R word tokens response, containing subsequence representing its overall answer A C y to the query. A corresponding confidence score, which we call the verbal confidence C, is scalar quantity attained with the help of the task-specific prompt that reflects the model's ' belief in the correctness of its answer A. The score is derived strictly from the output word tokens Y alone without any knowledge of internal model states. We refer to the entire process as confidence elicitation (CE). Formally, confidence elicitation methods (CEMs) are functions that map generated sequence of word tokens Y to confidence score, CEM: y - C. given a specific LLM that serves as a mapping function from the input prompts to the output sequence LLM (X, P) + y. As detailed in Section 3.4 the specific CEM functions can be implemented with different prompting strategies, including Chuin-offThoughi and Multi-Step prompting.
3.1 Verbal Confidence Attack Methods
We propose a series verbal confidence attack (VCA) methods to automatically generate adversarial prompts. As Figure aaa) demonstrates, a common range of alterations in prompt can significantly vary confidence estimates or predicted answers. This is undesirable since confidence should be robust when the meaning of X or P is preserved. The framework for the proposed attacks can be seen in Figure which presents our attack objectives based on generated numeric confidence scores.
The objective of our attack algorithms is to generate attacks based semantics, that cause a reduction in verbal confidence C. For an adversarial input sequence of prompt tokens x = ( .. ). this is a constrained optimization problem with a objec- tive: ming CEM(LLM(X,, P)), subject to Sim(X, X) > under similarity function Sim(.) and specified threshold т. Likewise, a similar formulation applies if X is unmodified and is the adversarial input. Unlike conventional adversarial frameworks, our objective is not to explicitly prioritize misclassifications, but rather to attack confidence and observe any consequences as a result. Unlike based attacks, misclassification are not necessarily bound to occur once the predicted confidence of the top class is degraded enough. Nevertheless, our goal is also to see how frequently misclassification can be induced by using VCAs given that this form of confidence is casily obtainable by adversaries. We study three threat vectors: user queries (X), along with system prompts and one-shot demonstrations that provide task examples (both of which comprise P).
input, while maintaining
3.2 Perturbation-based Confidence Attack
We propose two gerturbation-basee verbal confidence attacks: VCA-TF and VCA-TB. These VCA attacks are based on two popular black-box attack algorithms: Textfooler (TF) [3] and Textbugger (TB) (36). However, unlike the original algorithms, we design new scoring functions
3

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which are optimized using verbal confidence in contrast to class-wis probabilities derived from model logits. These methods first generate importance scores for each token in the sequence by determining the corresponding difference in the predicted confidence without the token present in the sequence. Then, each token is ranked and perturbations are prioritized on tokens with the highest difference. VCA-TF focuses on synonym substitutions, while VCA-TB also includes character modifications like common typos.
In addition, we formulate two attack types that iteratively attempt corrupting an input through random common typos (Typos/Ty:), or through word level modifications that include random synonym substitutions, adjacent token swaps, or token removals (SubSwapRemove/SSR to optimize the attack objective. Detailed descriptions of these perturbation- based attacks can be found in Appendix
3.3 Jailbreak- Confidence Attack
3.3.1 Confidence' Triggers
In Figure []b,, we show the potential for a more generalizable form of at- tack by designing a VCA method called ConfidenceTriggers, which is designed popular
Algorithm Confidence'Trigger Optimization
I: Input:
Set of confidence estimation methods Z, Set of training prompts X. # generations G. # prompts a, # tokens per prompt 9, # samples for initial estimation S, # training samples per iteration Ç. # elites
to target confidence based
jailbreak approach [35]. By optimizing a single series of trigger tokens that get ap- pended to any number of prompts, LLMS
2: Output: Trigger Token Sequence
length |
3: for all E 2 do
4: Random subset sample S examples from X
led generate lowered confidences
5: L. AverageCoutiddeneee.. S) w/o any trigger
scores for these prompts. Our work the first to optimize and study triggers that larget verbal confidence scores.
6: end for
7: <- InitializePrompis(a. (3)
8: for = 1 to G do
9:
for all P do
Evaluate fitness of each prompt
Triggers are optimized using com- pletely black-box genetic algorithm
10:
for all E Z do
Random subset sample & examples from
(Algorithm[]) [}. No model-specific infor-
12:
Log +- Lr, AverageConffidenceyy 2, E) Ls
mation or tokenizers are required, cor-
13:
end for Lp Lpp lZ
responding to the setup that only needs
14:
verbal confidence. To optimize for confi-
15:
end for
dence reduction, we first generate an ini-
16:
Sort P by Eyp
tial set of a prompts consisting of 33 num-
17:
P. +-]
ber of random words. These words come
18:
Add E. lowest loss prompts p P,
19:
while [Pol < [P do
from a list of approximately 2,000 words
20:
PADy, PADV, TToumamentSllea(KK = 2, P)
related to the topic of uncertainty to cre- ate initial focused search space. This initialization process is accomplished us- ing the InitializePrompts function in the algorithm. We append the triggers to the system prompt, as we will later show it is a more effective attack vector. This
according to Ly, Twice
21:
Choose random split point
22:
PADV, PADV, idx + Randomly choose 20% indices to mutate PADV, + Mutation(pADV, idx) P3 + P,+P, PADV, PADV,, PADV; end while
Cross-Over(p.ANV PADV, v)
23:
24:
25:
26:
also has the byproduct that if system
27:
Keep first a prompts in P, 28: P P,
or API is infiltrated with such a trigger,
29: end for
then confidence estimates subsequent
30: for all E do
(benign) user queries are compromised.
31:
for all = Z do
The loss function to be minimized is the difference in average verbal confidence
32:
Random subset sample S cases from X Lpc +- Lpall AverageConffidenccp.. 2, S)
33:
(see AverageConfidence function in Al-
34: end for
gorithm 5)) across & randomly sampled
35: Epo Era / 112
training examples when using the tested
36: end for
trigger compared to the average confi- dence estimated on S randomly sampled examples without the trigger.
37: T < P(argminn(Cpe)
D Prompt with lowest loss
To enable generalizability across different CEMs, we use four different variants to estimate the loss
for each trigger (detailed below in Section 3.4). To produce prompts for the next generation, first E
number of elites are selected, then pairs of parent triggers (from the previous generation) are iteratively
selected through top-k tournament selection 4 with A to undergo Single Point -vors-Over 226

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and Random (Uniform) Mutation (20 until there are a child prompts. For Cross- Over, a random split point is chosen and two child prompts are created whereby the first consists of the sequence from the first parent up to the split point, and then from the second parent after the split point, and vice versa for the second child. For Mutation, third child is created by iteratively sampling token randomly from either the first parent or second parent. To be specific, 20% of indices are chosen as mutation points, where a random word is sampled instead. After G generations, the lowest loss prompt is selected. The efficiency of this attack algorithm is dependent on the input parameters in Algorithm T with the equation for number of model calls needed to optimize a set of triggers being approximately ZZ| S - G * { |Z] be reused indefinitely. Detailed descriptions of settings and the Cross-Over and Mutation functions can be found in Appendix C.I
[Z] S, although once optimized set of tokens can
3.3.2 Confidence ConfidenceeTrigeers-AAn Triggers-AutoDAN
As an alternative method for more naturalistic triggers, we propose variant of Confidence Triggers based on AutoDAN (40] Seffideene/rrggees-Auttllo
AutoDAN is an algorithm for automati- cally generating stealthy jailbreak prompts through hierarchical genetic algorithm. Featuring the same structure as ceffidenceTriggerrs hierarchical perturbations are produced each generation at the sentence-level through synonym replacement based scores from momentum word score dictio- nary, and at the paragraph-level using GPT4 [4) to rephrase pairs of parent prompts for Cross-Over and Mutation. Full details and the algorithm are provided in Appendix D
3.4 Design of Confidence Elicitation
Our confidence elicitation methods are based on
Table 1: Description of CEMs.
the framework proposed in 770, where CEMs
primarily consist of a prompting strategy (i.e.,
CEMs
Description
Exumple Answer
task instruction) for generating verbalized nu-
Produce answer and com- fidence
80%
meric confidence scores. CEMs can also in-
CoT
Think step by step, prodace letter answer and confidence at
Since therefore the answer 80%
clude sampling strategies for generating mul- tiple LLM responses, which are then aggre- gated to ideally produce a more representative confidence. We use the self-random sampling strategy, which samples K different output se- quences {3,,)'2, ..... Vx} using specific temperature parameter, from which confidence estimates {CI,..., Cx] are derived. To aggre- gate these disparate estimates, we take the aver- age of the confidence estimates over the K estimates the final confidence estimate CAVG, and choose the most common predicted label as the answer AFINAL = ModeeAA.....,A
MS
Break answers into multiple steps, produce confidence for each. produce answer and overall conlisence
Step 70%.
I.... 90%, Step 2,
Final Answer: C,
85%
SC
Think step by step. produce letter unswer and confidence at the end. Sumple and age multiple answers.
(I)... therefore the answer is
B. 80% (2) believe so the
is B. 90% (3) the answer
95% Final Answer 33%
As described in Table I we propose incorporate four main CEMs: Base, Chain-of-Thouggh (CoT), Multi-Step (MS), and Self Consistency Prompting (SC) 688 The first three methods are based on deterministic sampling. SC allows us to assess attack effectiveness under more random variation by averaging confidence across multiple sampled responses. Note that we utilize an additional form of SC called SC-CA (Self Consistency- Complete Average) in certain experiments, most notably for developing Confidence Triggers, since utilizing absolute model confidence is beneficial for optimizing the algorithm. While SC averages the confidence scores of only the majority voted answer out of K predicted samples, SC-CA is concerned with absolute confidence and hence averages the confidence scores of all K predicted samples irrespective of the majority voted class. This is useful in cases where priority is on confidence irrespective of label (please refer to Appendix B for the formulation of SC-CA), We also note that MS produces far less confident responses allowing us to ascertain attack performance in lower confidence scenarios. We focus on these CEMs since they are the most straightforward to attain and directly capture the model's perception of confidence with minimal processing. Examples of prompts can be found in Appendix W
4 Experiment Setup
Data. We use popular Question Answering (QA) benchmark datasets that cover the generic, medical, and legal domains: (1) MedMCQA (MQA) (51) (2) TruthfulQA (TQA) (3 (3) StrategyQA (SQA) 18 We also use the AdvGLUE 65] adversarial benchmark for confidence attack agnostic results,
specifically the SST-2 61 set. Details can be found in Appendix C
5

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Models. We focus on two LLMs of smaller and larger scale parameter sizes: Llama-3 3-BB [1 and
GPT-3.5-turbe 49]. We also validate the results on GPT-40 49 and Llama-3-70B [ Refer to Appendix for details.
Evaluation Metries. The primary metrics are the average level predicted confidence on the original (Cf.) versus adversarial examples (Adv. Cf.). We track what percentage of examples had attacks that successfully reduced the confidence (%Aff.), the average number of attack iterations for successful attacks (#Iters) to compare the attack efficiency, and the average level of confidence reduction on successfully attacked examples (A Aff. Cf.) i.c., ones that experience a confidence drop. We show which percentage of adversarial examples led to answer changes, both among originally correctly classified examples (%Flp)OC)) and incorrectly classified examples (%Flp(OW))
Table Effectiveness of different attack methods when targeting questions in QA prompts against range of CEMs. Second column of Avg. shows the average distance between Cf. and Adv. Cf. Underlined are the most effective CEM results for each respective model/dataset/VCc method combination. In general, can observe significant differences in A Aff. Cf. post attack (up to 70%) and high percentages of affected samples (up to 85%) from VCAs.
SulSwapRemove
SEPDOC S.TDWW)
SPROOC SHROWT
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83.7
87.1
83.1
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86.2
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81.4
29.0
26.6
86.3
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41.8
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50.5
52.7
58.1
44.3
55.5
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76.3
6730
90.7
87.9
27.3
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10.5
32.9
85.1
23.5
7.3
71.4
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87.7
81.5
32.0
9.9
19.4
57.6
32.1
87.9
76.5
67.0
17.0
74.1
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43.2
26.6
25.0
8.2
66.3
29.5
37.5
43.2
23.2
33.0
6.4
60.8
67.0
64.8
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92.4
86.4
28.5
54
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22.2
43.0
92.4
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34.5
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34.7
08.8
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83.6
66.2
65.0
11.4
26.1
33.1
35.9
83.6
67.4
68.0
6.2
23.8
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42.2
88.9
81.5
26.5
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24.6
25,8
40.0
88.9
84.7
24.6
21.7
48.5
69.7
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89.9
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46.2
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91.0
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92.5
88.6
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6.9
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32.3
616
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91.9
89.5
41.5
12.8
5.8
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23.7
93.1
89.7
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7.3
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91.7
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96.4
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96.6
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8.6
5.6
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62.5
$3.3
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15.2
18.1
23.1
50.0
63.6
$2.9
60.0
8.7
17.8
43.2
77.0
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SC-CA
96.6
97.2
95.2
96.2
331
32.0
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15.0
300
4.4
20.6
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26.6
25.8
97.0
97.1
95.2
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96.3
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30.8
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88.2
81.5
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86.3
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37.0
24.7
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75.9
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92.4
84.2
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34.7
49.2
92.4
85.1
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24.0
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3077
78.1
MS
83.6
61.4
64.5
20.4
34.1
43.4
53.1
83.6
71.2
35.5
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17.8
24.3
15.6
91.1
77.2
71.5
12.8
19.6
29.3
30.2
91.7
88.8
27.0
24.6
10.8
11.1
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88.0
69.1
78.5
19.2
24.2
61.3
100.0
87.4
74.3
75.0
24.5
17.5
20.7
100.0
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3.3
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95.6
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5
Experiment Results
5.1
Confidence Agnostic Attack
We first determine whether CEMs are robust against generic confidence-agnostic adversarial attacks by comparing the confidences generated for the original instances in SST-2 [61] and their AdvGLUE (65

---

versions. The results are in in Appendix where the difference in confidences are minor, with most a 5% drop. CEMs are shown to be generally robust against aaniidence-gnnosti perturbations, even though they are effective in reducing accuracy.
VCM-T
VCA-TB
5.2 Perturbation- Attack
30
To assess proposed attack framework, examine the four main VCAs against all of the CEMs across the three main datasets. For each dataset we randomly select 200 examples and test attacks against both correctly and incor- rectly answered ones with the average perfor- mance across the examples. The results with user queries as the target are outlined in Table 2 We can see that the attacks are effective at reduc- ing confidence on adversarial examples, yield- ing greater decreases in confidence scores com- pared to confidence-agnosti attacks. Neverthe- less, the CEMs are largely resistant to drops in confidence of more than 50%, and the range of examples that experience drop ranges from less than 5% up to 85%. When the attacks are effective, they lead to average confidence drops of 20%, which can have great effect human perception of veracity (consider a confidence of 90% versus 70%). The MS CEM, with far lower average confidence levels, is significantly more susceptible to the attacks in terms of confidence reduction, and in general the scenarios with lower average confidence are more susceptible, revealing that the greatest risk is for less confident approaches. A high percentage of the attack methods lead to answer changes, often flipping 50% up to 100% of answers, showing our framework leads to success in terms of the traditional adversarial objective.
25.
25
20.
20
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AM
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Figure 2: Averaged system prompt (Sys.) and demonstration attack (Demo.) performance across all models and the Base and CoT CEMs combined. Blue area over bars shows relative gains over equiv- alent query attacks while red show losses. We observe high level of affected samples and signif- icant average differences in confidence.
In Figure F we present the averaged results across all datasets and models when using system prompts and demonstrations as attack vectors, focusing on the most robust CEMs in the Base and CoT methods (for full results, refer to Table ij Appendix [F). System prompts and demonstrations are often more vulnerable VCAs compared queries, with the former being more effective at reducing confidence of the two, while demonstration-be based attacks lead to higher rates of answer changes.
Table 3: Sub-sample of attacks using Llama-3- 70B and GPT-4o (averaged across all datasets and CEMs). Best performance is underlined.
Results on GPT-4o and Llama-3-70B. Due to the high cost of adversarial attacks, we design an experiment using the SOTA models, GPT-4o and Llama-3-70B, and run them over SSR and TB, covering the most effective of the different attack classes. The results (targeting user queries) are in Table 3 (full results in Table 10), confirming the findings in Table [
I. Llams-3-70R
Arg.
4.3
32.4
12.4
29.5
56.3
GP
38.0
11.4
2F4
556
Llamo: 3 700
Ang.
38
26.6
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149
26.4
In Table we further test an additional three recently released models in Llama-3.1 1-B8B [1. Llama-3.3-708 [1. and 03-mini 49
CPT-4o
39.4
10.9
163
to show consistent VCA performance across recent architectures.
5.3
Jailbreak-based Attacks
The performance of the optimized triggers (on examples not used to optimize triggers) in both the original and AutoDAN variation are shown in Table Additionally, random tokens baseline included as control. For this, we generate a prompt consisting of M = 20 randomly selected confidence related words that are appended to the system prompt. Very high confidence drops (up to 29.5%) can be achieved with SeeiidenneTriggeer although with inconsistency. AutoDAN is less effective but can still lead to large confidence (up to 16.7%). Both approaches outperform the random tokens baseline. SrafidenceTTrigeee also leads to a high percentage of answer changes, although the AutoDAN variant is less effective. Nevertheless, we show that triggers from the AutoDAN variant transfer across datasets in Appendix U
SafidencceTrigeen
7

---

Table 4: The effectiveness of SeffideeneTriggerry TraaidenceTriggerrs Triggers-AutoDAN, and random tokens baseline are in reducing downstream confidence scores. The highest averaged drops Confi- dence'Triggers across all methods of confidence for a given model are in bold. The highest perfor- mances for each metric are underlined. Negative A's show that average confidence increased post attack. We observe large A Cf. induced by optimizing a single set of tokens.
Random Tokens
Coutidenee
Confdeene AutoDAN
Cr
ATT.
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AAII CT (FC)OC)
SPPp((WW)
A
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1.1
0.5
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1.3
4.0
71.4
66.0)
100,0
2.1
97.0
22
$5.0
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1.1
88.5
122
$1.1
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4.9
97.5
70.6
2,5
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3.9
28.3
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28.5
17.5
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26,0
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67.4
72.0
38.8
0.9
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244
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14.9
3.01
90.5
3.4
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63.4
79.5
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73.0
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0.9
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2.2
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0.7
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93
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0.3
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19
19.0
41.9
8.6
202
89.0
9.1
7.4
22.2
5.4 Stability of Confidence
To understand the stability of verbal confidence, we track confidence and answers as words removed in succession based on their importance score from user queries. This allows us to understand how confidence and answers change as the most critical words are removed, and when the input is completely stripped of its original contents. Figure 3 shows that the average confidence scores fluctuate inconsistently tokens are removed. Even with most of the sequence missing, the difference largely remains below 15% compared to the original. This also demonstrates that reducing verbal confidence effectively requires specific optimization rather than degrading the input as much as possible. In contrast, answer changes follow a consistent pattern as they occur more often when the sequence is corrupted more. As a result, answer generation is more responsive relevant factors in a sequence of text than confidence.
In Appendix G we continue to study input corruptions by masking or randomizing confidence scores for each sub-step when using the MS method and observing how the LLM shifts its final predicted confidence when generating based on the corrupted input. The effects are found to be minor, with even the most extreme cases only leading to drop of 30-40%. Consequently, we determine that generated confidence scores are stable with regards to serious text corruptions.
MeaMEDA GPT-3.5
<trateguGA GPT-3.
truchnugg
MedMCCA 11mma-3-0
dralegygA- -1mm--3--00
Figure 3: Average changes in confidence and answers words are removed from queries according to their importance score, as a function of the percentage of word sequence is removed (Percent into Sequence) for Llama-3-8B and GPT-3.5. Positive A is for decreases in confidence compared to baseline and negative represents increases.
8

---

5,5 Confidence Behaviour
To understand the invariance of the tested LLMs, we provide the distribution of generated confidence scores in Appendix M showing that LLMs rarely predict low confidences. We also determine that the most significant confidence changes occur on examples where the predicted answer changes (Appendix P. revealing how LLMs' confidence is most vulnerable when they appear to be unsure of an answer. Nonetheless, in Appendix Q we test attack variants prioritized on only manipulating confidence and show that overall confidence vulnerability is not strongly tied to whether the model's answer is ultimately changed due to adversarial perturbations.
We further evaluate attacks effectiveness when: (1) using lower threshold for semantic similarity (Appendix K). and find that increases in attack effectiveness are minor, (2) LLMs are prompted to provide phrasal confidence from a Likert Scale (Appendix [ noting that attacks affect these disparate manners of confidence elicitation similarly, (3) using the Self-Probing CEM (Appendix (]) we find that generating answers and confidence score in separate steps brings few benefits. Moreover, in Appendix H when different phrases that ask LLMs to change their behaviour in terms of confidence are added to prompts, there are very large shifts in confidence. On the whole, these results reveal that LLMs' maintain high level of certainty irrespective of input, and behaviour primarily changes when explicitly instructed, though not often in ways that are expected.
Finally, we study aligmment between numeric confidence scores and token log probability confidence in Appendix [ where we conclude that attacks create heightened misalignment adversarial examples. This hurts model honesty by demonstrating that consistency between internal states and verbal outputs is degraded through minor perturbations. Amid the growing importance of calibration analysis, we observe how notable degree of underconfidence is induced after attacks which aligns with our expectations (Appendix N). Despite generally high confidence levels, we highlight that LLM calibration does not entail honesty or lack thereof, since model can become calibrated solely though imitation of a calibrated individual (77). hence we stress the importance of examining robustness and we validate
honesty regardless of inherent model calibration patterns. Nonetheless, in Appendix O the calibration of our CEMs by presenting Brier scores [5] across our results. The scores produced are reasonable (below those seen in works such (15)), and in most cases increase post attack showing that miscalibration is generally induced through VCAs. Lastly, we also compare AUROC scores prior to and after VCAs in Appendix [ where we find that AUROC decreases after attacks, confirming that VCAs are effective at degrading both confidence and predictive performance.
5.6 Defences Against Jailbreak- VCAs
Table 5: ConfidenneeTigggers-AAuoo TonnidenneTriggens--r AutoDAN on Llama-3-8B, Negative A show that average confidence increased post permutation.
Paraphrase and SmoothLLM defense results against
SQN
TQA
STOA
Pamprrus
A.Iic
A.C.O
XCL.A.
SCAII
ATT
W.Ahh
Bosr
-343
$3.5
-1.5
43.4
34.5
Cor
40.0
27.5
47.8
11.0
-1.8
78.0
30.0
10.9
52.9
3.1
92.0
1538
120
331
Cor
58
90.5
6.0
67.
10.2
MS
-14
98.0
56.0
11.9
-17
-0.7
100.0
46.5
36
3.7
99.5
55.5
0.
Jailbreak-based VCAs present threat as although many detection systems for detecting and filtering general unsafe behaviour exist, none exist for detecting whether jailbreaking prompts are designed to influence confidence. To highlight the limitations in existing methods, we examine three typical categories of defences [72): two input permutation defences (Paraphrase defence (29] and Smooth- LLM (59] and one self- prof-proc perplexity filter defence (29). Refer to Appendix S for details. We experiment with jailbreak- based VCAs due to their more generalizable nature and many recent works are devoted to mitigation strategies against jailbreaks. We center our analysis on ConfidenceTriggerss AutoDAN, since the more naturalistic triggers offers greater difficulty to filter- based techniques compared to the main variant. Llama-3-8P serves as the target model. We use the same setup as for Results on GPT-3.5 are in Appendix R
Table 4
Table presents the results for the two input permutation defences. We show the difference in average confidence provided by the LLM between the original set of data and those with the permuted prompts without any trigger phrase (A Cf. O.) and with it (A Cf. A.). Additionally, we note what percentage of permuted examples with originally benign (% Aff.) and trigger-included prompts (% Adv. Aff.) had an altered generated confidence level compared to the original un-permuted version. Finally, we record the average decrease in confidence after input permutation the fngger-inncuddr prompts (A

---

Adv.), Our findings are that these defences lead to significant changes in confidence with both the inclusion and exclusion of a trigger phrase (differences up to 43%). With the majority of examples having their confidence unnecessarily altered from these defences, along with minimal decreases in attack effectiveness after adversarial prompt permutation, we deduce these defences are ineffective.
Table 23 in Appendix R presents the results of the perplexity filter and LLM-Guard [22], focusing on the percentage of user queries that experienced a confidence drop post VCA that get filtered, and which percentage of prompts with no trigger that would get filtered. In most cases for both methods the majority of these examples do not get filtered.
5.7 Perturbation-based VCA Defence Challenges
We detail how utilizing common defences against perturbation- based VCAs presents a major chal- lenge. To illustrate the difficulty in applying a perplexity filter defence, in Table o we compare the average and standard deviation of the perplexity across normal, adversarial (generated using VCA-TF and VCA-TB), and typical set of human generated text (500 samples from Twitter Sen- timent 40 (99) using Llama-3-8B on TQA. Through this, we show that despite the perplexity of perturbed inputs being higher than the base tested dataset, it still has notably lower perplexity compared to real-world text obtained from social media which represents a typical range of informal and unrefined language that models can expect as input in many domains. This illustrates the diffi- culty of setting an effective perplexity filter without making strict assumptions about the input data distribution, as perplexity is not elevated beyond an unreasonable level.
Table 6: Using Llama-3-8B on TQA data, the average and standard deviation of the perplexity (Perp.) across original (O.), adversarial (Adv.),
Given the lack of explicit mentions of confidence in perturbed adversarial examples, we demonstrate in Table 27 that by using a simple filter from prompt- ing GPT-4.1 (detailed in Appendix T to flag any inputs trying to manipulate confidence scores, it is possible to detect all direct confidence statements but none without them. This shows that while di- rectly asking an LLM for a desired confidence level an effective attack, it is very easily detectable compared to targeting confidence using indirect means like minor word or character level modifica- tions, hence why they are the focus of our study.
and data from Sentiment 1 40 is presented.
O
Adv.
Sentiment140
Avg. Std.
Avg.
Sid.
Avg.
Std.
Perp. 70.3
84.1
350.1
640.2
436.7
1043.4
6 Conclusion and Limitations
We have established the threat to LLMs from VCAs through comprehensive study across different datasets, CEMs, and threat vectors. By formulating four perturbation-ban -bated and two jailbreak- based methods, we reveal serious vulnerabilities that can cause frequent and high levels of changes in verbal confidence and predicted answers. Through extensive analysis on the behaviour and properties of CEMs under a variety of scenarios and mitigation strategies, we demonstrate inadequacies with existing defences at fully mitigating the effects of attacks. Ultimately, as black-box LLMs become more widely adopted among both general users and in safety critical tasks where getting uncertainty estimates is key, we believe a higher focus needs to be ascribed not only to creating new and better calibrated black-box probability measures utilizing verbal confidence, but ensuring that such measures are also robust. This can be done by developing strategies for mitigating the ease with which they can be utilized for adversarial attacks and how simply they can be manipulated through trivial changes in input. In this sense, future methods need to be robust against VCAs but not so robust that they prevent LLMs in responding adequately to situations where the confidence should change.
The nature of running adversarial attacks requires many costly LLM queries, so we are unable to run more extensive experiments on larger language models. Nevertheless, powerful I.LMs at different scales, and corroborate our results using recent SOTA models. In addition, we primarily focus on character and word-level VCAs and have demonstrated their effectiveness. Sentence- attacks can be constructed using similar framework which we leave for future work. Our main VCA objective is also confidence reduction to mirror conventional adversarial attacks. VCAs aimed at increasing confidence are possible, but leave less room to study attack effectiveness due to the high confidence of victim LLMs. Lastly, we note that the datasets we test possess low ecological validity [10]. Nevertheless, we have focused on well-studied datasets which are widely used in previous works. This is important, as due to the inherent variability of real-world data is important to explore the idea of VCAs with well-tested datasets in tasks that previous work has covered for ease of interpretabilityy We strongly encourage future work to explore how the unique properties of different domains and tasks affect VCAs.
highlight two
10

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A Motivation
Industry Use of Verbal confidence Firstly, we stress that studying verbal confidence and its robustness is an important topie given that there are numerous instances in industry where systems have been developed that utilize some form of LLM verbal confidence in their methods to conduct confidence estimation. They utilize verbal confidence largely due to limitations with black-box API access and since the scores are not arbitrary [46 48 they have value as a confidence measure.
These use-cases are shown to ultimately be concerned about robustness [8 42 75 which we will highlight. Chen and Mueller [ develop Trustworthy Language Model (TLM) where Reliability and explainability is added to every LLM output and decision-making is conducted using trustworthiness scores. This score quantifies the certainty of the model to its answers by combining checking the consistency and the level of verbal numeric confidence of the model's responses. Zhang et al. [75], in the context of cloud incident root cause analysis, develop a method for on-call engineers to make decisions on whether adopt model predictions using a method that incorporates LLM-based confidence estimator using verbal confidence due to the black-box nature of the APIs of SOTA models. In MacDonald 42 they build an LLM-based product to structure unstructured data and score customer conversations for developing sales and customer support teams. These scores are based on level of customer satisfaction and given relevant (proprietary) context, the LLM produces score (verbally) and reasoning for that score. In all of these use-cases it is clear that compromising the robustness of these verbal scores creates a risk of system malfunction or a degradation in operation. Likewise, in Mohri and Hashimoto [46], although not directly related to industry. show the usefulness of utilizing verbal confidence in a specific application, which is that of generating conformal factuality guarantees for language models. They reveal that verbal confidence outperforms the arbitrary confidence baselines (i.e., randomly generated confidence scores and ordinal confidence), demonstrating its value.
Importance of Calibrated Generated Confidence Scores in Real World Applications Many prior works such as Dhuliawala et al. [T]. Zhang et al. (76). Rechkemmer and Yin [57], have estab- lished how harmful miscalibrated (skewed) confidence scores are in human studies and downstream human-Al collaboration applications, showing that user behaviour changes greatly in response to Al confidence scores, leading to over reliance when an Al system is overconfident, one example. Most notably, Dhuliawala et al. [IT] shows in the context of human collaboration with LLMSs how un-confidently correct stimuli reduce user trust with only few miscalibrated instances creating long-term poor performance on tasks.
Moreover, works such as Bernsohn et al. (3. Beam and Kompa (2) Penso et al. [54], Jiang al. [30] highlight the impacts of altered confidence scores on downstream authority mechanisms in legal and medical domains, since many such applications that involve tasks such as diagnosis rely on model uncertainty to determine further review. In Bernsohn et al. (3] as an example, in the task of detecting legal violations, entities with high confidence undergo additional processing, and therefore reducing the confidence estimates in the examples would compromise the operation of the system.
Risk of Adversarial Attacks Based on Confidence In addition to harm done by reduced confi- dence scores (when answers remain unchanged), our key contribution is also demonstrate verbal confidence can be used to effectively craft conventional adversarial examples (i.c., ones that lead to answer changes) as well, which presents issues in practical scenarios (e.g., misclassified cases). This is important because such scores are easy to obtain for adversaries for black-box models, and can be used to manipulate the confidence measures that can most easily be asked for and understood by human users.
Without our work, it is not clear how effective the proposed attacks would be, given the very different properties of using generated outputs versus internal model states or proxy white-box model. If adversaries are able to easily generate attacks using solely the generated output, this presents great security concern.
Our formulation of this issue also has contributions terms of its implications towards model honesty and how models express their level of knowledge/competence through confidence. A key aspect of this study is to determine how easy their behaviour to manipulate through various types of mostly superfluous modifications, and through our analysis determining among which aspects there are the most vulnerabilities. In short, one of our objectives to see how models "perceive" confidence overall and hence we look at multiple different aspects of how models react to different changes of
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input. We primarily test generalist models to get a broad view of the problem of robustness and to avoid making any conclusions that would only apply to a singular domain.
Threat Model Similar to established adversarial attack setups, users of the LLM do not necessarily have to be the ones conducting the VCAs. Long-tailed examples can naturally happen to jeopardize the victim model including variations (like typos) in their input that can affect confidence and one aspect of this analysis is to see how easy it is to change confidence scores like this.
Secondly, our overall threat model is different compared to other NLP adversarial attack works; adversaries can craft adversarial examples independently without being the direct user of the system being attacked. If an adversary is able comrupt a series of queries beforehand, then when somebody (i.e., a user) tries to evaluate these queries asynchronously they get miscalibrated confidence scores without being aware of any changes. For example, samples from a database can be manipulated by an adversary and swapped in without a user being aware.
When we refer to attacks against user queries, we do not necessarily mean the current user is intentionally crafting an example to see how much they can lower the model confidence since the model can simply be prompted to change the score (as we show can be effectively done in Appendix Hj. Nonetheless, various changes the user obliviously makes to their query can also affect the confidence hence we study the impact of perturbations and corruptions. Ultimately, we wish to see how effectively it can be done by different source such as an external adversary.
We study three different threat vectors. An adversary can also target demonstrations or the system prompt too without a user being aware when they send their own unmodified query. This can be form of data poisoning attack since, for example, adversarially modified demonstrations could be used by a developer of an LLM system unknowingly from a database of seemingly benign demonstrations.
Real-World Use Case A hypothetical scenario for the threat of VCAs could be that of a legal professional using a proprietary LLM to determine whether a series of prior cases are relevant to their current case, where highly relevant/high confidence predictions above a threshold are used to tell them specifically to further examine the case. An adversary wishing to target this legal professional could attack the database of cases so that a series of low confidence predictions are produced on attacked examples, potentially causing the professional to miss relevant cases when presenting them to the LLM, leading the model to cease being useful, creating severe inefficiencies and ultimately eroding user trust.
B Details of Perturbation-based Attacks
The general algorithms for the four different character and word-level adversarial attack methods we cover can be seen in Algorithm For VCA-TF and VCA-TB we make modifications the black- box algorithms to make the algorithm work in the context of attacking confidence scores generated using CEMs, as these algorithms originally based using the predicted softmax class-wise probabilities derived from model logits. Refer to more details in Jin et al. [I and Li et al. (36] respectively for more detailed settings as we faithful the original algorithm except with respect to the scoring functions used. For the Typos and SumSwe attacks, we make use of our own design choices which we detail below. In the algorithm, the potential options for the target attack text X are user queries, system prompts, or demonstrations. Additional input text Q refers to the two remaining text inputs that are not undergoing the attack (e.g.. if the user query is targeted, Q represents the system prompt and demonstration). The parts that are attacked for user queries refer to the question only, without the multiple choice options. For system prompts the entire prompt detailing the task instructions (i.e.. how to generate answer and confidence score) can be attacked. For the demonstration attacks, the demonstration a one-shot example for a given CEM. Within the examplc, the question, multiple choice options, and the expected answer can be targeted.
For VCA-TB, the possible random bugs that can be generated include inserting spaces into words, deleting characters, swapping adjacent letters, swapping characters with visually similar characters, and substituting words with one of its nearest neighbours. We use WordNet [14 to search for synonyms for each token and calculate the semantic similar using Euclidean distance with GloVe embeddings [53]. Likewise, with VCA-TE, we use the same approach to generate list of synonyms, although we also ensure that synonyms contain the same part of speech (POS) tags using NLTK [4]] To perform the Typos attack, we generate a series of common typos in sentence (GemerateCommon Typos function). These typos include substitutions with nearby characters on an English keyboard,
19

---

Table 7: Description of SC-CA CEM.
CEMs
Description
Example Answer
SC-CA
Think step by step, produce letter answer and confidence the end. Sample and aver- age multiple answers.
(1) .... therefore the answer is B. 90% (2) I believe... ... so the answer B, 95% (3) ... the answer must be A, 80%. Final
Answer B, 88.33%
random character deletions, and adjacent character swaps. A probability of 0.1 is used to select the percentage of characters in a full text sequence modify each iteration. We cap the number of iterations at 25.
In the SubSwapRemove algorithm, MOD function applies a random perturbation given token. This modification can be either a synonym substitution, a swap with an adjacent token, or the token is deleted from the sequence. The probability of selecting each modification is equal. For the synonym substitution, we sample five top synonyms similar to VCA-TF and keep the substitution that results in the greatest drop in confidence if drop occurs at all with any of the synonyms.
Across all attacks, we stop attacks once the original predicted answer is changed and record this along with the final confidence to keep track of how easily the answer can change.
The description for the SC-CA CEM and an example is provided in Table
C Detailed Experimental Settings
Dataset Details: (1) MedMCQA [5 is a multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) dataset consisting of 2816 questions with four choices that are based on medical entrance exam questions. (2) TruthfulQA (39) is a MCQA dataset consisting of questions that cover broad range of safety- critical topics like health, law, finance and politics and is designed so that humans can easily answer incorrectly due to misconceptions. We use the MCI (Single-true) subtask, and only use multiple choice questions with 4 total answers for consistency yielding 203 total examples. (3) Strategy [18] consists of 2,780 true or false open-domain, general topic questions that require implicit reasoning steps to answer. Lastly, we use S57-2 [6]] from the popular AdvGI.UE (65) adversarial benchmark for our baseline confidence attack agnostic results. In the benchmark, SST-2 consists of 137 movie reviews annotated for binary (positive/negative) sentiment. Instances in AdvGLUE underwent a comprehensive series of word-level, sentence-level, adversarial algorithmic modifications, in addition to human- -enna-eeee perturbations to most effectively deceive a wide range of language models. For experiments, we use the development sets for MedMCQA and TruthfulQA, and the training set for Strategy QA.
Model Details: Llama-3-8B and GPT3.5-turbo GPT-40 [49] and Llama-3-708 1 being utilized for certain additional results. The Llama models are locally while the GPT models are ran through the OpenAl API. In terms of sampling parameters for each model, we utilize a temperature of 0.0 for Base, COT, and MS method, along with a top_p of 0.95. For SC and SC-CA, average the confidence scores. We limit the number of generated tokens to 400. For the MS method, we calculate the geometric mean of the generated confidence scores for each step including the final.
49
primarily used for evaluation, with
set the temperature 0.7 and sample three different responses and
Sentence Similarity: To ensure adversarial examples preserve the original meaning, we encode both the original and adversarial example using Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) [7]. We then calculate cosine similarity between the vectors and forgo perturbations that cause a fall below threshold of 80% similarity to keep adversarial examples retaining similar meaning of the original sentences similar to the approach in Wang et al. [67].
Confidence Extraction: Answers and confidence are extracted from the generated answer of the LLM using robust regular expressions looking for all possible mentions of letter answers and their corre- sponding numeric confidence. the rare cases where models refuse to answer or provide confidence score (or the regular expression fails), the final answer defaults to tnne-offthe-above and the final confi- dence score is set to one with max entropy possible (i.e., 1 //uuubeer of Multiple Choice Options)) respectively. Over the course of optimizing an attack, if no confidence is provided, the perturbation is rejected unless the answer choice flips as well (signifying a successful attack).
20

---

Algorithm 2 Overview of Tested Attack Methods
1: Input:
Confidence Estimation Method 2 for LLM, Tokenized Target Text X, Additional Input Text Q Sentence Similarity Function SIMO. Perturbation Similarity Rejection Threshold c, Max Iterations 7, # Synonym Candidates Neys.
Output: Adversarial Example X X
x(Q.X)
Original Confidence Score
Importance Score Based Methods:
Filter Stop Words
all f;j X
Jg. =Q x.
Xya. & without token š;
10: end
11: X
12: Sort according
13: -VCA-TB-
14: for all wa W do
15: Bug +- Randomly Selected TextBugger Bug
16: Xtemp <- xm,<>Bug
Bug replaces original token X
17:
If SIM(X, Xtemp) > then
18:
(Q, Xtemp) <C then
19:
X + Xtemp
20:
end if
21: end
22: end for
23: -VCA-TF-
24: for all wy E W do
25: Candidates +- Generate top Neyn POS tag filtered candidate synonyms for un
26: topscore null
27:
all E Candidates
28:
8 Xtemp 8 Send
end replaces w; X
29:
if SIM(X, Xtemp) > then
30:
If (topscore null AND 2QQ, Xtemp) < C) OR (=(Q. Xtemp) topscoree then X Xeong topscore =(Q, 8(mmp)
31:
32:
33:
end
34:
end
35:
end for
36: end for
37:
38: Typos:
39: for iterations do
40: Xtemp + CeenerateoommonTyposs
if SIM(X. X Rimny) > then
42:
=f X.omp) < C then
43:
X Xxemp
end
45: end
46:
end for
47:
48: SubSwapRRmove:
Filter Stop Words X
50: for all ē; & do
51:
MOD <- Randomly Choose Perturbation Type from [Sub, Swap, Remove]
52:
&iemp +- MOD ( 8)
53:
SIM(X, { > then
54:
if (Q), Xtemp) < C then
55:
X - Xump
56:
end
57: end
end
21

---

Algorithm 3 TonigdenneTriggers Cross-Over
1: Input: Initial Parent Prompts Pi and P2
2: Output: Child Prompts C₁ and C2
SplitPoint Choose random integer between and m-2
4: C1 Pıl: SplilPoint + P2 Pa[SplitPoint
5: C2 22 Polnt + Pi Split Point
Algorithm 4 Confidence'Trigeen Mutation
1: Input: Initial Parent Prompts P1 and P2 of length /
2: Output: Child Prompt C
3: RandomOption < Choose either P1 or P2 mutate randomly
4: IndicesToFlip Sample 20% of indices P1 to mutate
==
6: for j O..... 33 do
7: j in Indices ToFlpp then Add random word to C
8:
else
10:
if Randomoption--, then
11:
AppendP [ [ to
12:
else
13:
Append Pa[j] C
15: end if
16:
end for
C.1 Confidence Triggers Settings
To optimize the performance ConfidenceTriggers, we evaluated variety of algorithm parameters. However, given the significant amount of iterations necessary to optimize the algorithm, we limited some parameters like trigger prompt length while still aiming for strong results. Regarding our training text corpus, for MedMCQA and StrategyQA, triggers, and evaluate it on the remaining 30% (out of which 200 random samples are selected). Given the relatively smaller size of TruthfulQA, we train the triggers on questions with five multiple choices options (yielding 197 different examples) and evaluate on the 203 questions with four options. For trigger prompt length 3 we choose 20 tokens, and for the total number of prompts we attempt to optimize a we also choose 20. We experimented with optimizing between 20 and 50 total generations. For the number of samples for the initial estimation S, choose 200, and the value & for each iteration we choose 12, leading to 48 different sampled training cases used for estimation for each prompt each generation. We choose fifth of prompts (i.e., 4) with the lowest loss to be elites. An example the generated triggers can be found in Appendix
use 70% of the data for optimizing the
The Pnittalizeeromppsto.. (3) function in the main algorithm that is used to create the initial set of a triggers before optimization occurs, essentially for each trigger generates a string of B number of random tokens that are uniformly sampled from the of confidence related words. The AverageConfidence function is defined in Algorithm 5
Our procedure for Cross- and Mutation functions remains largely faithful to Lapid et al. [35 and are standard implementations for these functions given two parent sequences of data. Cross-Over the standard Single point Cross-Over (26) operation and Mutation is Random (uniform) Mutation 20 where words at randomly chosen indices are replaced. Pseudo code for Cross-Over and Mutation can be found Algorithm and fand4resse respectively. The tournament select process is top-K like in Blickle and Thicle 4
D Confidence Trinddnncriigge--AAAtDD..... Details
In this section, we present the algorithm along with the details for the AutoDAN variation of the Confidence-Trigeens algorithm. The general algorithm can be found Algorithm aaadd generally follows the original version of Confidence'riggee methods of the AutoDAN-HGA algorithm in Liu et [40] in that we make use of the hierarchal structure of prompts and incorporate both sentence and paragraph level optimizations.
but is modified to incorporate the steps and
22

---

Algorithm 5 ConfidenceTTigggeee AverageConfidence Function
1: Input: Confidence Estimation Method 2, # Samples for Estimation Prompt Set P
2: Optional: Trigger string
3: Output: Average confidence C
4: Pn < Sample n samples from set of prompts
5: if then
6:
Confidences, Generate confidence using = for p E Pn with i appended to p
7: else
8:
Confidences, <- Generate confidence using z for p E Pn
9: end if
10: C = Σ Confidences.//n
A few key differences exist between ConfidenceTriggasssAttDDDD and AutoDAN-HGA due to the nature of attacking confidence compared to jailbreaking. Firstly, rather than the initial adversarial prompts being based on previously successful manually curated jailbreak prompts, we generate series of sentences using GPT4 that indirectly encourage a model to output low confidence scores. We limit the initial prompts only single sentence and not paragraph length like in the original variant for simplicity given that pre-established multi-sentence length triggers for attacking confidence are not available. Other aspects of the algorithm, like the functions for Cross-Over and Mutation are largely faithfully adapted, but with some changes. Each of the main functions in the algorithm are detailed below.
InitializePromppa rompts((a) function generates a different prompts using a proxy model (GPT4) that en- courage the production of low confidence scores (Diversification). The model fed a prompt stating to "generate a sentences that would encourage a model to produce low confidence scores in a machine learning context but in an indirect manner."
Momentum Word Score is calculated the same way as in AutoDAN-HGA. A dictionary is established in which words from each of the prompts are added if they are not part of a collection of common stop words, punctuation, proper nouns etc. When word is added as key its score is added as value. The score is derived from the loss of the prompt it originally came from. If the same word is first being added and it is present in multiple prompts, the score is averaged. If a word has key it is updated using a momentum mechanism, whereby the updated value is averaged between its current (previous) value and the newly computed (current value + new value)/2. The words in the dictionary are finally ranked based on their scores in descending order.
Replace Words with Synonyms functions by looping through each word in prompt, and a series of synonyms are found for each. The word dictionary is searched using these synonyms and if one is present then it probabilistically replaces the original word based on the relative scores of all the other synonyms that are present in the dictionary.
The process of selecting parent prompts for Cross- Overr and Mutation involves weighted random sampling. a - E prompts are randomly sampled without replacement with the weights based on the loss i.e., more effective prompts are more likely to be sampled. Each prompt is added list and then is paired up with its neighbour in the list (the first and second, third and fourth ...). If there an odd number of sampled prompts, then the last and the first in the list are paired again. The sampled prompts then undergo Cross-Over and Mutation.
For Cross-Over, if randomly sampled float between 0 and is above the threshold, then the process occurs for a pair of prompts. In our experiments, we use a threshold of 0.5. As prompts do not span multiple sentences, performing cross-over by splicing together different sentences from both prompts as in the original algorithm would not work. Instead, Cross-Over works by using powerful LLM (GPT4) to combine the two parent prompts as succinctly as possible. The following system prompt is fed to the model: "You are helpful and creative assistant who writes well." Afterwards, the user prompt is as follows "Please combine the contents of the following two sentences (prioritizing preserving the first sentence) while trying to keep the length as minimized as possible (below 100 words). Please only output the revised version." " By feeding the two prompts but in different orders, this yields two child prompts with combined content but with different orders/priority.
The Mutation function occurs all cases. The two parent prompts are fed individually into a powerful LLM (GPT4) with the same system prompt as Cross- -verr but with the following user prompt: "Please revise the following sentence with no change to its length and only output the revised version." " This induces degree of variance into each child prompt.
23

---

Algorithm 6 Confidence TrindddnnTTTggee--AAAAAAA
1: Input: Set of confidence estimation methods Z, training text corpus X, # generations G, # prompts # initial samples for estimation S, # training samples per iteration &. elites E Output: Trigger String
3: for all 2 E Z do
4: Random subset sample S cases from X
5: L. f AverageConfideenee,,, S)
Basc confidence w/o any trigger
6: end for -IitializePrompps(a) 8: for = 1 to C do
9:
for all E do
Evaluate fitness of each prompt
10:
for all Z do
Random subset sample & examples from
12:
Lyg + Lp, AverageCnniidence(. 2, () L.
13:
end for Tipa Σ p end for
14:
15:
Sort P by Lr,
17:
P. --1
18:
Add E lowest loss prompts to Pa as elites
19:
Sentence-Level:
20:
Calculate momentum word score
21:
Replace words with synonyms for each p
22:
Puragraph-Level:
23:
Use weighted random sampling to select E
parent prompts into list P parents Pair each PADV parents together for all (p., ps)) unique pairs in Pparents do
25:
26:
rand t Random float between 0 and if rand < 0.5 then
27:
28:
Pa. Pa + CrossOver(pa..pb)
29:
30:
Mutation(p..)
31:
< Mutation(p:)
32:
Add pa. Pa Ps
33:
end for
34:
if [Pol
PP| then Keep first PP| prompts in P,
35:
36:
end if
37:
P P,
38:
end for
39:
for all E P do
40:
for all Z do
41:
Random subset sample S cases from X LpG +- Lpall AverageCoutidenee(p....)
42:
43:
end for
44: LpG + L.p / /
45: end for
46: T < P(argminn(Cpel (p
Prompt with lowest loss
A total of 100 generations is used to optimize the prompts. The remaining settings are consistent with those detailed Appendix C.T. An example of the final generated triggers can be found in Appendix X
24

---

E Confidence Agnostic Attacks
Table 8: Results of confidence agnostic attacks on SST2.
Difference in average confidence and accuracy between unmodified and adverserial instances are reported, along with the percentage of examples being affected.
Cr.
Adv. Ct.
Acc.
Adv. Acc.
% Aff.
Base
74.0
71.0
61.8
42.0
46.6
Llama-3-8n
CoT
88.2
87.2
44.3
42.0
72.5
MS
80.2
81.3
49.0
48.1
83.2
SC-CA
74.6
69.6
51.9
51.9
97.7
Base
92.7
90.4
100.0
86.3
45.0
GPT-3.5
CoT
93.5
89.7
100.0
87.0
39.7
MS
90.3
85.6
100.0
86.3
75.6
SC-CA
94.6
90.7
100.0
85.5
64.1
We examine if CEMs are robust against generic confidence-agnostic adversarial attacks. To this end, compare the confidences generated for the original instances in SST-2 [6]] and their AdvGLUE 65 versions since these comprehensive adversarial modifications were solely optimized for misclassifications. The results in Table g where the difference in confidences
minor, with at most a 5% drop despite a high percentage of samples being effected. CEMs are shown to be generally robust against confidence-agnosti perturbations, even though they are effective in reducing accuracy by 15-20%.
F Full Results Tables
The full results for the system prompt and demonstration attacks in Table 9 Likwise, the full results for attacks against Llama-3-705 and GPT-4o are in Table
G
Multi-Step Corruptions
Llama 3 8B
GPT-3.5
Average Confidence
0.-
0.4
0.8-
0..5
Mask Rand
Rand StratogyQA
Rask TruthfulQA
M45k Ranol McdMCQA
Mask Rand StrategyQA
Mask Rand Truthfuiqa
Figure Comparison between original average final confidence using the MS method (lighter shade) and the resulting average final confidences (darker shade) when 50% of the confidences in the individually generated steps are masked (Mask) or randomized (Rand).
To further analyze how responsive LLMs are to corruptions, we aim to determine how the final confidence scores generated by the MS method are affected when confidence scores for each generated step are either masked or randomized. This provides further insights how representative the
25

---

Table Effectiveness of confidence adversarial attacks against system prompts or one-shot demon- strations.
System Prompt
VCA-TB
CT.
Adv.
CI.
%
AlE.
Nitess
AAR CI. SEIPOC
SEPOW
CE.
Adv. CF.
% Al..
fllers
AAE. Ct. &Fip(OC)
TQA
Buse
87.1
34.7
11.0
41.9
21.6
8.7
16.2
87.1
80..1
25.01
11.8
16.0
32.5
124
SB
Col
86.7
81.2
18.0
22.3
30.7
71.4
46.6
86.7
81.1
20..5
19.9
27.1
42.9
45.6
Col
89.1
83.1
13.3
31.7
44.4
29,4
32.2
89.1
81.7
35.0
14.3
21.3
45.
38.4
SQA
CoT
92.4
60.0
55.0
32.9
58.9
56.9
$2.0
92.4
$0.8
50.0
26.3
23.1
36.1
75.0
TQA Baze
D4.1
9..
221.3
3.7
13.6
11.1
'932
19.5
1KT
GPT-35
Col
922.1
89.2
28.0
127.3
10.5
21.1
24.7
92.2
90.0
21.0
23.9
10.5
26.9
32.1
MQA Base
93.8
91.6
22.0
60.0
9.9
11.7
12.5
93.9
92.3
21.0
17.5
7.5
15.7
23.5
CoT
96.3
35.0
6.0
15.6
30.8
97.0
95.5
27.0
35.7
5.6
15.1
40.5
SQA
Baze
96.4
95.3
22.0
44.0
5.0
0.8
2.9
96.3
95.2
21.5
33.5
5.1
4.5
14.9
CoT
95.8
28.5
39.0
10.2
9.9
22.9
95.0
94.3
11.5
35.3
6.5
12.0
38.0
Arg.
24.3
56.1
22.5
22.9
27.4
27.0
22.2
13:4
27.9
40.5
TQA Buse
87.1
84.4
13.5
46.0
20.2
9.5
20.3
87.1
81.0
26.5
20.0
22.9
34.9
35.1
86.5
75.0
21.5
MQA
Buse
87.7
83.7
20.5
44.2
19.6
5.7
23.2
87.7
83.2
43.0
16.2
10.4
31.8
43.8
CoT
89.1
82.5
14.5
30.6
45.6
33.3
32.2
89.1
80.7
38.0
17.6
22.1
56.9
39.7
SQA
Base
43.2
35.4
20.0
39.0
38,9
29.5
29.5
43.2
32.4
28.5
27.2
38.2
63.4
72.7
CoT
92.4
56.0
56.0
36.8
65.0
$2.8
82.0
92.4
79.9
50.0
29.6
24.9
38.9
75.0
'TQA""
Russe
94.7
"23.D"
T66.7
9.8
13.7
11.D
94.36
'93.8"
15xT
6.66
'97
'622""
GPT-3.5
CoT
91.3
89.1
26.5
207.3
8.4
18.6
24.4
92,3
89.6
28.5
31.7
9.3
32.3
35.5
MQA
CoT
96.8
94.8
35.5
45.5
5.7
17.0
30.8
96.6
95.0
28.5
41.6
5.7
18.0
43.1
SQA
5.0
29.0
CoT
95.3
92.6
30.0
45.0
9.0
10.7
30.0
95.2
93.9
17.0
36.7
7.8
13.3
36.0
Avg.
27.1
SubSwapRemmove
TQA Bate
87.1
84.4
16.0
47.1
17.0
59.5
66.2
x7.1
78.3
14.5
22.4
25.6
85.7
86.5
3,8
86.2
61.6
39.9
100.0
73.8
43.22
MQA Base
87.7
76.2
42.5
49.2
27.0
44.3
67.0
$7.7
80.0
53.5
39.2
14.3
73.9
88.4
SQA
Base
43.2
33.3
23.0
48.0
43.1
70.5
72.7
43,2
38.3
24.5
21.9
20.3
92.0
94.3
Col
92.4
62.5
42.5
65.0
68.1
89.8
92.4
64.5
34.4
62.5
90.6
TQA
Buse
94.5
90.0
46.0
K2.7
9.7
18.0
38,9
94.7
92.8
27.5
22.5
6.7
29.1
A2.5
GPT-35
CoT
91.1
86.1
49.5
96.6
10.1
27.5
60.0
92.3
87.0
49.5
31.1
10.6
32.8
80.2
MQA Base
93.9
88.6
49.5
83.6
10.6
23.3
$7.5
93,9
91.7
26.0
36.0
8.6
26.7
53.8
CoT
96.0
92.1
49.0
47.6
8.0
25.6
64.2
97.3
94,1
42.0
48.7
7.5
27.4
69.2
SQA
Baze
96.3
34,5
50.8
6.7
13.6
26.5
96.3
39.0
20.9
6.1
23.3
35.8
Col
95.2
92.0
37.0
48.5
8.6
18.5
40.8
95.3
93.5
23.5
43.4
7.9
22
47.1
64.7
17.6
Typos
TQA Base
87.1
34.2
19.0
21.6
15.3
96.0
57.8
87.1
86.
8.0
24.6
12.2
20.6
23.0
CoT
86.7
76.8
49.0
27.7
20.2
100.0
99.0
86.7
$6.3
4.5
25.0
9.4
0.0
26,9
MQA Baze
87.7
82.3
32.0
23.6
16.9
77.3
$8.4
87.7
$6.5
6.5
25.0
17.3
9.1
12.5
Col
89.1
37.5
23.5
98.0
98.0
89.1
$6.88
16.0
26.3
14.7
$6.9
$7.0
SQA
Base
43.2
38.9
16.5
18.8
26.0
95.5
95.5
43.2
42.7
1.0
25.0
55.0
6.3
6.8
TQA
Bize
94.6
39.5
53.0
24.5
9.6
17.3
24.7
94,9
94.3
6.0'
25.0
5.44
15.9
16.2
GPT33.
92.2
21.5
MQA Baze
93.8
$8.2
56.0
25.0
10.0
16.0
40.7
93.9
93.7
1.5
25.0
5.7
5.0
20.0
95.8
6.6
55.1
6.8
44.9
SQA
Buse
9644
93.2
45.0
25.0
7.0
9.9
27.5
96.3
96.0
5.5
25.0
5.0
3.8
888
CoT
95.2
92.2
37.5
25.0
8.2
14.5
35.4
95.1
94.6
5.5
25.0
10.0
14.9
36.5
40.6
24.5
14.2
47.1
61.5
9.3
25.1
14.8
14.3
28.8
26

---

Table 10: Results sub-sample of attack methods using two SOTA LLMs (Llama-3-70B and GPT-40).
SuhSSapRemove
VCA-TR
CT.
Adv. CT.
1 A.A..
A.I.I CT.
(Pi((C)
SFIKUW)
CT.
Adv. CT.
16 AlL
A AIT. CI. SPPPPC))
SHipPW))
TQA
17.5
17.5
7.5
CoT
90.1
68.2
10.0
19.5
21.5
90.1
$9.1
18.0
1.7
MS
67.3
59.3
51.5
15.6
23.5
51.3
67.1
CALU
41.5
17.2
21.1
33.8
9C'
89.5
18.0
21.3
90.0
7.5
90.1
4.3
Lhmma-3-700 3-708
MQA
Rase
86.9
85.3
16.0
9.8
24.6
60.3
86.4
85.1
13.5
9.8
4.8
10.9
CoT
93.7
15.0
12.8
311
71.2
93.7
7.4
SC'
93.3
91.3
26.3
7.8
29.0
70.9
93.7
92.2
21.0
14.1
33.3
SC-CA
94.0
91.9
28.5
7.3
300
64.6
93.7
91.7
18.5
9.7
28.6
453
99.8
MS
82.5
68.1
71.0
20.3
$4.9
51.5
$2.1
67.0
67.5
22.4
29.3
57.6
17.2
Arg
4.3
32.4
12.4
29.3
56.3
3.8
26.6
12.8
14.9
25.4
TQA
Base
174
38.5
10.6
Col
89.0
87.7
10.0
13.3
16.7
48.5
89.3
89.0
3.5
9.3
2.4
9.3
MS
60.6
52.6
55.0
14.6
16.3
45.8
61.0
53.8
44.5
15.9
19.0
87.5
16.1
SC-C4
80.5
86.7
46.0
6.0
164
47.2
80.3
88.1
19.5
10.0
12.7
MQA
Base
9013"
67.7
37.0
7.2
203
58.5
96.2
35.2
31,0
3.7
GPT-40
MS
61.9
52.7
00.0
15.3
25.9
70.6
62.3
52.2
60.5
15.8
13.9
89.4
VC
91.2
B8.5
47.5
5.8
2015
67.6
91.2
S9.4
40.0
16.1
37.5
SQA
CoT
91.5
83.8
51.0
15.0
44.6
55.9
91.6
85.9
38.5
14.9
16.4
28.6
MS
44.3
79.5
27.4
89.7
SC-CA
91.9
84.4
62.5
12.0
37.0
61.5
91.6
86.0
58.5
9.7
20.5
42.6
48.0
27.1
39,4
16.3
31.2
Table 11: Results using SSR user query attack on TQA using: Llama-3. 1-8B, 3.ma--3.3-0B. and 03-mini. We observe that the results are similar the original models in our study, and the same conclusions can be drawn.
Cr.
Adv. Cf.
% Aff.
#lter.
A AfT.
Cf
% Flp(OC)
% Flp(OW)
Llama-3.1
Base
81.5
76.8
27.0
7.3
17.2
14.3
42.2
CoT
87.2
83.3
32.5
7.1
11.9
30.6
54.9
MS
71.7
59.6
67.0
18.0
16.3
60.5
SC-CA
85.2
80.7
39.5
11.3
32.3
52.5
Llama-3.3-700
Base
92.2
19.5
17.1
25.0
CoT
89.8
85.8
20.0
8.8
19.6
24.2
$1.3
MS
71.1
60.6
66.0
7.3
15.8
13.2
43.8
SC-CA
90.0
86.4
32.5
8.4
10.9
19.0
40.5
03-mini
Base
89.8
87.6
34.0
6.4
21.9
59.7
CoT
91.0
85.6
54.5
10.0
18.8
58.2
MS
72.5
63.1
75.5
12.4
59.4
SC-CA
89.5
86.0
53.5
5.3
9.4
49.0
confidence scores are to the model's reasoning, and whether they adequately respond to corruptions their thought process, as we should expect a fairly large response as the original output corrupted if the confidence scores truly faithful. To facilitate this, response, and then randomly select 50% the steps and their corresponding confidence score. The original score is subsequently either masked replaced with randomly generated score between 0 and 100%. We then feed the corrupted sequence back to the model to observe the change in its final step confidence final confidence is typically minor, in particular with the randomization, which on average lead to a confidence drop of 10-20% most. Masking has greater effect, but in the most extreme cases only leads to a drop of 30-40% on average. In many cases the model still remains highly confident even after undergoing these modifications.
the MS method to generate
Figure shows the resulting responses. It displays how the effect
27

---

Table 12: Effectiveness of different phrases appended to user queries on TruthfulQA. Averages A Overall Cf. are shown for cases where confidence goes up and down respectively. Negative values represent increases in average confidence compared to the original examples. Averages for A Overall Cf. are separated by where the confidence goes down and up respectively.
AdrCT. 3.0md
SPROC,
GFjeOW
No.
30
M.
WHIOK: SPRORT
76.1
92
K6.1
35.0
50
913
26.5
-1.
SC-C5
$6.4
2.7
88.5
311
62.5
01.
05.5
74.5
2.0
9.3
31.0
12.6
24.5
540""
51."
"3.0
30.2
32.
22.2
R50
23.3
Cx7
85.3
$4
64.0
3,4
1000
36.
72.6
19.3
59.5
33.3
48
15.4
3DS
61.4
98.3
HKY
14.3
46.1
133
13.8
15.4
$0.0
$1.5
103
86.5
21.4
5.6
87.5
3i6 Cinidei
25.0
62.0
87.0
SC-C4
9.
50.5
1rm75% Cookieas
15.3
11.
990
11.
20.
985
1933
122
Cx7
76.8
11.
900
15.2
1000
60.5
12.
9600
14.5
183
66.0
21.5
6.5
77.1
STD
56.7
1300
134
133
SC
R2.1
62
93.5
6.7
74
BED
$1.0
119
98.5
13.1
6.5
23.3
SC-Ch
B0.6
95.5
6.2
82.9
79.2
13,6
07.0
140
0.5
33.5
Tíe 1004 Ciiillei
Base
96.4
11.8
163
1852
27.6
31.5
100.0
7.
0%.1
-35
-922
1000
2000
-119
1983
077
Resic
156
M..
1000
00.2
233
3EA
21.
D000
8235
B52
5620
confidenco
4144
47.3
95-1
19.2
1000
62.4
1800
48.7
MS
55.7
16.3
93.0
16.6
77.1
45.5
25.3
43.3
99.0
44.3
6.7
16.9
SC
37.6
50.7
100.0
50.7
11.1
22.5
43.5
$2.0
99.5
52.3
3.2
39.1
NLL
27.0
100D
27.0
96.7
75.5
4013
L000
53.1
4.5
42.5
Bane
1556
7225
-23""
213
35.2
160
onafidenco sorm
05.6
-1.
1000
49
confidence
63.3
2633
26.9
1000
61.1
111
879
90.5
SC
61.2
26.5
99.0
20.1
20.7
22.2
73.1
2033
1000
25.3
5.0
24.1
TH
16.
91.1
16.
R57
06
71.5
1977
194
735
76.9
154
1SB
"5.3"
NL.
confideace scvre
C-7
$4.9
37
850
4.
00.9
208
83.2
63.0
14.2
23.5
14.1
-27
98.5
-27
88.6
413
50.9
193
03.0
20.7
7.4
26.3
7.
160
17.4
96.5
-014
-ILY
92.
14.4
SC.Ch
92.1
344
99.5
34
$7.1
74.
92.6
13
03.5
3.3
30.7
"662"
165
"333"
31.
350"
"D2"
"0'"""
Gu7
16.1
12.1
47.0
34.9
1000
S5.
57.4
90.0
10.4
4.1
41.7
MS
40.3
26.3
9900
24.5
66.6
2011
35.3
33.1
92.0
33.7
4.7
37.1
45.0
12.8
43.5
82.0
1000
26-1
BEd
2977
32.0
SC-C4
21.
22.4
11
210863
4330
163
36.70-55
H
Confidence Phrases
In this section, test how verbalized numeric confidence scores change in response when prompts include different phrases related to confidence that ask the model to alter its level of confidence. In this way, we can determine how easily model is to directly manipulate with different "commands" and how this compares to altering confidence through generic perturbations as we have studied. Additionally, we can observe whether large changes in confidence can occur through such phrases. We test total of 12 phrases, ranging from statements about how confident model should be (e.g.. 0%, 25% 50%. 75%, 100% confident), being asked to provide low, high, moderate, or randomized confidence scores, or being asked to be overconfident, overconfident, or of uncertain confidence (max entropy). We test two variations, where these 12 phrases get appended to either user queries (Table 12 or to system prompts (Table T3). and compare the relate results in terms of confidence.
Overall, we see that model behaviour when prompted through user queries varies greatly, but generally responds to the requests and results in great differences in confidence, particularly with the Base CEM. CoT and SC are in general overconfident compared all methods regardless of how the model is prompted. The level of affected samples is very high, but is not 100% in the majority of cases,
28

---

Table 13: Effectiveness of different phrases appended to system prompts TruthfulQA. Averages A Overall Cf. are shown for cases where confidence goes up and down respectively. Negative values represent increases in average confidence compared to the original examples. Averages for A Overall Cf. are separated by cases where the confidence goes down and up respectively.
30haal
SAll.
WHaOK:
SPROOT
1.5
41.3
06.0
SC.C1
$5.1
0,
85.5
04
00D
74.3
91.
1.5
63.0
24
18.9
Bar
023
24.5
3077
50.7
20.
312
25"
M55
121
Caf
$7.3
20.5
7.
636
S6.6
85.8
31
4000
7.8
5.0
18.5
M5
11.2
08
0M
65.6
6112
30
MLD
499
74
2544
86.3
75.5
311
800
2.1
3.0
11a7 Cookdest
Bear
K2.3
10L
S3L1
505
899
Cal
16.2
04
23.0
10
72.7
56.6
93.5
56.5
6.2
48
M5
TIL
16.5
177
686
06.1
66.1
-1.0
37
76.1
SC
88.5
08
74.5
1.1
74
83.5
840
4.4
922
20.3
SC-CA
88.2
05
28.5
0.5
7L.
72.
90.2
805
6.3
16.3
1006 Ciiislei
Bor
5002
$6.5
3A
280
91.3
-1.
36.1
41.5
-110
Resie
Baz
365
36.5
1000
0..3
65A
290
D80
1900
confidencr
13.4
25.6
50.1
21.1
A5
60.8
11.2
95.0
11.8
65.7
46.
41.3
19.0
84.5
22.5
36.5
40.5
SC
14.5
13.4
88.0
15.
53
30.8
79.4
14.1
1900
14.1
7.7
20.0
73.1
16.4
97.3
14.7
91.
701
14.3
VLS
140
6.3
Sor
545
850'
1220
350
TES
onafidenco scom
-19
2200
57.5
Soir
720
confidence
86
09
750
SC
80.1
93.0
83
25.2
$4.1
1900
8.9
13.0
SC-CA
83.1
41.0
16
78
BES
89
10.3
37.4
Neur
T1Y
16.
"87
confideace scrre
Go?
87.3
25.0
488
81.8
35.6
68.5
5.0
0.0
22.6
MS
73.5
-1.5
86.5
-1.7
50.0
6.7
88.3
32
800
150
10
50.0
95.7
-.9
680
114
SC.C4
92.6
.51
95.0
5.
833
91.3
02
630
0.4
12.0
$3.9
Mi
36
"50""
"
955
33
Cx7
K3.1
1.5
49.5
11.
$1.8
SET
81.8
81
00.5
81
411
19.0
MS
67.8
42
9400
4.
74.
43D0
63.
78.0
104
4.9
21.9
12:1
1641
ME-CA
11.2
8.1
83.0
SC-C4
5.5
83.5
$3515
349
81
61614
hence even this method of directly prompting the model always effective changing model confidence behaviour. Targeting the system prompt is less effective than targeting the user query, particularly with GPT-3.5. The models are likely in most cases ignoring the prompt contents is not core to their task.
I Confidence Expressed Via Likert Scale
In addition numerical confidence scores, is possible prompt the model to produce confidence scores in the form of phrases fairly certain) derived from Likert scale, which can potentially alter model behaviour and bias compared to numeric scores given that phrases are more naturalistic and resemble how humans typically express confidence in the real-world. We aim to analyze how attack performance changes when a model is asked to provide a confidence based on a seven point Likert scale where the options are the following:
i) Completely Certain
ii) Very Certain
iii) Fairly Certain
iv) Moderately Certain
29

---

Table 14: Confidence attacks against LLMs prompted to output Likert scale-based confidence scores on the TruthfulQA dataset.
Cr.
Adv. Cf.
% Aff.
Af.. Cr.
(:P)((OC)
FFIP(OW)
VCA-TF
Base
77.9
73.9
7.5
53.3
1.9
9.8
CoT
87.1
84,4
6.0
45.0
10.5
13.2
31.6
42.0
19.0
19.5
33.6
21.2
SC-CA
77.8
20.5
39.4
26.7
VCA-TB
Base
77.9
73.6
8.0
54.7
2.8
9.8
CoT
87.1
82.3
12.0
39.8
15.1
14.0
MS
31.6
22.1
48.5
19.6
24.1
35.4
Llama-3-1 -88
SC
84.3
74.0
41.0
25.1
29.3
25.7
SC-CA
85.2
22.8
32.3
SSR
Base
25.9
CoT
78.3
39.4
22.1
50.9
MS
31.6
21.7
56.0
17.6
29.9
54.0
SC
81.9
67.8
64.5
21.9
26.0
66.3
SC-CA
84.3
73.0
61.0
18.4
28.0
$7.9
Base
77.9
74.9
43.8
5.6
21.7
CoT
87.1
84.5
10.5
13.7
11.5
SC
82.8
67.5
72.0
21.3
38.6
74.7
SC-CA
84.0
80.7
22.0
15.3
14.9
26.4
Avg.
7.3
31.5
30.2
20.4
32.8
VCA-IF Base
3.1
CoT
85.9
85.5
2.0
21.5
0.0
MS
59.8
52.8
35.5
19.8
13.4
56.1
SC
86.1
82.1
45.5
8.7
22.0
24.7
SC-CA
85.6
81.7
46.0
8.6
16.2
21.4
VCA-TB
Base
84.7
79.5
17.5
29.9
6.1
7.4
CoT
85.9
85.3
20.3
3.1
59.7
51.9
17.3
28.4
SC
86.2
81.2
50.5
9.8
23.6
20.5
GPT:3.5
SC-CA
85.3
79.9
48.0
11.3
25.0
20.6
SSR
Base
84.7
76.1
24.5
35.0
32.3
49,3
CoT
84.9
82.3
10.0
26.0
22.8
54.5
59.9
51.6
42,0
19.8
24.0
75.9
80.5
58.0
10.3
31.5
SC-CA
78.7
29.7
Ty
Base
84.1
65.0
$1.0
37.5
30.1
62.7
CoT
85.8
82.8
15.5
19.0
38,9
68.9
MS
59.0
50.0
48.5
18.6
31.0
81.0
SC
85.8
78.6
74.0
9.8
31.8
62.0
SC-CA
84,9
78.1
73.5
9.2
36.2
65.7
Avg.
18.7
22.5
30

---

Table 15: Results when using the Self-Probing CEM.
Cr.
Adv. Cr.
% Aff.
Aff. Cr.
(Fip(OC)
FOW)
TruthfulQA
TF
78.6
70.3
22.0
38.1
24.6
17.1
78.6
71.0
31.4
19.5
SSR
78.6
60.9
40.5
43.8
33,9
62.2
7y.
78.6
71.9
19.5
34.6
22.9
32.9
Llama-3-4 3-8B
MeiMCQA
VCA-IF
91.3
90.6
12.5
14.6
VCA-TB
91.3
90.3
3.0
34.2
17.3
17.7
SSR
91.3
84.7
15.5
42.4
45.2
76.0
Ty:
91.3
90.8
28.1
VCA-TF
94.3
81,9
44.5
27.8
21.4
65.2
Strategy
VCA-TB
94.3
77.5
53.5
31.5
27.9
69.6
SSR
94.3
77.0
60.0
28.8
29.2
80.4
7y.
94.3
87.4
27.0
25.8
7.8
50.0
Avg.
8.6
26.2
32.1
24.8
44.4
TruthfuQQ
TF
90.8
89.9
15.0
6.0
13.5
28.4
91.7
89.9
20.0
23.3
SSR
91.3
88.8
28.0
9.2
33.8
79.7
Ty:
90.6
87.9
29.5
9.3
54.5
89.4
GPT-335
MedMCQA
VCA-TF
95.7
94.8
12.0
7.3
15.2
8.0
VCA-TB
95.8
94,9
16.0
5.8
22.0
22.0
SSR
95.6
93.4
21.5
10.2
52.5
80.8
Ty.
95.9
90.9
33.0
14.9
73.7
95.1
Strategy QA
VCA-IF
96.3
93.7
33.0
7.9
21.1
64.2
VCA-TB
96.1
92.4
39.5
9.5
30.6
62.3
SSR
96.6
92.1
52.0
42.2
88.7
Ty:
96.4
90.2
64.5
9.7
58.8
92.3
Avg.
2.8
30.5
36.5
61.2
v) Somewhat Certain
vi) Not Certain
vii) Very Uncertain
The statements are converted numerical confidence scores for use attack algorithms by in- terpolation. The first option is set to max confidence (100%) and the last to maximum entropy (L/num_me. iiti__mccpppiniiot
100%), and the remaining values are interpolated between these two values according to linear scale. We determine how effective each of our attack algorithms are in this context, and Table 14 presents the key results. Overall, there attack performance compared to when the LLMs produce numerical scores, and performance is very similar in terms of average confidence drop and percent of samples that undergo drop. We do see that A Aff. Cf. is very high but this can be attributed due to the discrete nature of the scale meaning any change in answer results in large confidence drop (i.e., it cannot 5% like when using numerical verbalized scores). In general, however, we do see similar level of invariance in terms of confidence here and as such this behaviour of the model generalizes across both numerical and phrase-like like confidence estimates which means LLMs model both numerical and phrasal confidence similarly and present rigidness in both.
noticeable improvement in
J Self-Probing
Self-Probing (SP) is an alternative CEM (See prompt example in Appendix W for a description) that divides the process of generating an answer and confidence score into two steps. An initial prompt used to have the model elicit only an answer (with the addition of any corresponding rationale), and then for the second step, the model is prompted with this answer and is asked to provide confidence based on the answer's veracity without being informed that it originally generated the answer. By dividing the process of generating an answer and confidence score in two different steps, it provides potential buffer to the attack algorithm to reducing confidence scores when targeting user query, possibly improving attack robustness. In Table T5] we test this assertion across Llama-3-8R and GPT-3.5. We find that across the different attack algorithms the performance of SP is comparable
31

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with the other elicitation methods, and has less robustness than the simple Base method for Llama-3, meaning its basic form it does not serve as a strong defence method.
K
Testing Lower Similarity Threshold for Attacks
Table 16: Difference when altering threshold for similarity metric to 0.4 when evaluating attack effectiveness MedMCQA. The averages with the results shown (Avg.) along with the differences between the new averages and the averaged results for original threshold attacks from Table (A Og. Avg.).
CI.
Af..
Á Aff.
SFip((C)
SFipOW
VCA-TF
2.0
CoT
4.0
42.1
17.5
21.5
MS
14.5
76.2
SC
4.8
48
30.5
15.7
30.1
SC-CA
3.6
Aug.
6.0
20.1
28.1
35.9
31.4
Og Arg
0.5
VCA-TB
Bose
1.6
7.0
23.4
10.2
19.5
MS
17.8
57.5
31.0
90.5
65.8
SC-CA
8.3
38.0
20.8
$7.5
$1.8
Lluma-3 3-B3
Aug
0ggg Arg
1.0
-5.4
3.8
2.2
5.1
SSR
Ca7
12.1
34.5
35.2
96.1
96.0
SC
8.6
8.6
48.0
18.0
45.2
9.7
Aug
11.
169
653
73.7
Og. Arg
2.9
Rose
8.3
31.0
26.8
83.0
86.6
12.6
32.5
100.0
97.3
MS
22.1
81.5
27.2
81.0
91.8
9.5
19.1
75.6
SC-CA
11.9
62.5
19.1
94.3
96.6
Aug
123"
4344"
323
75.
Og. Arg.
8.8
-0.2
23.9
23,4
12.1
VCA-TF Buse
0.4
1.5
6.4
6.7
CoT
0.8
13.5
12.8
17.9
MS
9.3
50.5
18.5
36.5
39.7
SC
1.0
1.0
3.2
22.1
SC-CA
1.9
35.5
23.9
30.6
Ang
17
210
16.6"
237
Arg
0.1
-5.6
0.4
VCA-TH
Rase
0.3
3.0
10.0
1.6
7.8
CoT
0.9
16.0
12.5
MS
109
59.5
18.3
43.3
49.2
SC
1.2
1.2
3.3
29.0
SC-C
2.4
41.5
5.7
28.9
32.3
3.1
24.2
15.5
179
21.4
GPT-355
Og Aug
0.1
-5.4
67
-18
1.6
SSR
CWT
2.2
31.0
7.1
96.2
74,2
SC
2.2
2.2
49.0
4.5
39.0
Aug.
3.8
31.1
17.9
30.2
64.3
Og Arg
Ty.
Base
2.1
20.5
10.1
69.9
83.1
MS
12.0
62.5
19.3
62.1
$6.8
SC-CA
4.5
55.5
8.0
61.3
82.5
J0g
4.5
347
T&T
502"
A Og. Arg
0.4
-.99
10.3
-1.6
1.3
Given the relatively high threshold of similarity (80%) used in our experiments for rejecting adver- sarial perturbations, we wish to determine by how much attack effectiveness can improved with much lower threshold and whether allowing more adversarial perturbations leads to significantly more effective attacks in terms of confidence reduction. We choose the MedMCQA dataset as our baseline, given that the attacks have been shown to the least effective on it overall, and study how much attack effectiveness (targeting queries) increases when the similarity threshold is halved to 0.4.
32

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Table 17: Llama-3-8B Base method alignment. Averaged values shown for each.
Verb. Cf.
Verb, Adv.
Log Probs.
Adv. Log Probs.
Cor:.
Adv. Con:
VCA-TF
87.1
85.7
94.0
94.0
0.221
0.151
Trahbbox
VCA-TB
87.0
84.1
94.0
93.5
0,041
0.029
SSR
87.1
83.1
94.0
92.7
0.009
0.014
Ty.
87.2
80.9
94.0
92.6
-0.066
-0.077
VCA-TF
87.6
86.
85.5
84.0
-0.152
-0.084
MedMCQA
VCA-TB
87.7
85.6
85,5
84.5
0.312
0.297
SSR
87.6
83.1
85.5
82.3
0.000
0.079
Ty.
87.6
83.3
85.5
79.2
0,011
-0,133
VCA-TF
43.0
26.7
92.3
93.7
0,011
+0,038
VCA-TB
43.0
92.3
93.0
-0.038
0.084
43.4
22.3
92.3
92.8
0.070
-0.055
Ty:
43.2
20.3
92.3
95.7
-0.521
-0.348
The results can seen in Table [6 The improvements in attack effectiveness terms of average confidence drop are marginal in most cases and most methods, particularly for GPT-3.5. In this way, shows that the general invariance to the attacks is a general pattern and that persists even under loosened conditions for generating perturbations.
L Alignment between Confidence Scores and Model Log Probabilities
We follow the approach of Kumar al. 33 to study how closely aligned the verbalized numerical confidence scores are with the underlying model log probabilities for predicted tokens. Token-level probabilities provide the likelihood (X, P). of each individual word token Yi in output sequence V, can be aggregated (e.g., averaged) to derive an overall "confidence" which primarily represents the likelihood of the whole output (akin language modelling loss), which in contrast verbal confidence which provides singular number directly from output sequence y We focus on the Base CEM it is the only one that produces simple answer confidence score pair. The analysis is performed on Llama-3-8B as its internal states are accessible. We attain a confidence score using log probabilities by finding the original predicted multiple choice answer token (e.g., ... B) and taking its log probability. We find the maximal log probabilities for each of the remaining potential answer tokens capturing all potential variants (e.g., a, A) in the token space. We then run all maximal probabilities through a softmax function and use the highest value for the final log probability-basee confidence score,
Table 17 shows the average confidence prior to and post attack and the corresponding average normalized confidence based on token log probabilities for each dataset and attack method. We also calculate the Spearman correlation coefficient similar to Kumar al. (33] between the generated confidence scores and log probability-bas -basld scores both before and after undergoing adversarial attacks. The Spearman's 's rank correlation coefficient measures the degree of association between two distributions of verbalized and log probability -bbaee based scores and as a result reveals how honest the model's 's verbalized scores with its underlying log probabilities. Despite the average verbalized and log probabilities confidence scores being close, we find that the correlation is weak or even negative in most cases and hence the log probabilities are not well aligned between the verbal confidence scores. The adversarial confidence scores in most cases show even poorer alignment than the original confidence scores despite both confidence measures decreasing compared to pre-attack, meaning additional misalignment introduced through the confidence attacks.
M Confidence Score Distribution Analysis
In this section, we plot the distribution of confidence scores for different models and CEMs and attempt see whether it matches distributions of percentages in real world data. We plot the full confidence scores obtained from rumning all of our attacks against user queries for GPT-3.5 in Figures 10 12 In general, we observe highly overconfident distributions, particularly for the Base methods and when using GPT-3.5 as a whole, where lower confidence scores below 50% are rarely predicted by the model, and even under adversarial attacks the confidence scores rarely get shifted to the lower levels of confidence.
5 6 g and for Llama-3-8B in Figures
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To model real-world data distribution, we choose the popular RACE dataset [34], large scale multiple choice dataset that closely mirrors the use-case for our main experiments. and plot the distribution of mentions of percentages (e-g., 50%) in the dataset in Figure 13 We see that the distribution in real-world datasets does not match the model's 's prediction. As such, the behaviour of the models is not a direct result of the natural distribution of mentions of percentages in related data, which we particularly see with the infrequence if 95% in real data compared to being the dominant model prediction. Hence, the overconfident and limited distribution (and as result the invariance under attacks) is inherent in the model behaviour but due to other factors. We test an additional dataset, Reddit Corpus (small) [25], in the conversational domain in Figure 14 observe whether there are significant differences. When plotting percentages we again observe a wider and more uneven distribution compared to the LLMss We lastly use the WikiText dataset [3] to model generic distribution that is commonly used to train LLMs, and the results can be seen in Figure T5 The distribution is very similar to RACE.
In contrast to simply finding the distribution of percentages, we also examine how common phrases like X% sure or Y% confident are in the data. Using the Reddit Corpus (small) since it contains natural conversations, we plot the distribution of these phrases in Figure T6 Unlike the previous examples, we note that this distribution is more overconfident and resembles the skewed distributions of the LLMs. This signals that models are likely copying natural human conversational patterns of exaggeration rather than balanced distribution of confidence scores one would find and expect in real-world data.
10%
38h
396
ale anc soc 1th
1006
Figure 5: Confidence score distribution using GPT-3.5 with the Base method.
40
129
Corfidence Level (%)
Figure 6: Confidence score distribution using GPT-3.5 with the CoT method.
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Frequency
244
255
WC
sel
Level
Figure 7: Confidence score distribution using GPT-3.5 with the MS method.
Frequency (K4
140
300
Alc. aRC s0C 66h
MX
3000
Carffdence
Figure 8: Confidence score distribution using GPT-3.5 with the SC-CA method.
155%
200
13%
328
16
28%
40s
20%
19%
2006
Figure 9: Confidence score distribution using Llama-3-8B with the Base method.
35

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40% Confidence Level (%)
Figure 10: Confidence score distribution using Llama-3-8B with the CoT method.
619
259
23h
40% 20%
30hh
Figure 11: Confidence score distribution using Llama-3-8B with the MS method.
410
Corfidence Level (%)
Figure 12: Confidence score distribution using Llama-3-8B with the SC-CA method.
36

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300
40% Confidence Level (%)
Figure 13: Confidence score distribution in the RACE dataset.
200
23h
29%
40% 20%
30hh
200%
Figure 14: Confidence score distribution the Reddit Corpus (small) dataset.
470
Corfidence Level (%)
Figure 15: Confidence score distribution in the WikiText dataset.
37

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19
AnG 40e 50c 9th 66h Corfidence Level (%)
Figure 16: Confidence score distribution in the Reddit Corpus (small) dataset focusing on utterance
of confidence.
N Calibration
Calibration is a key aspect of safety-critical systems, requiring that model confidence predictions are closely aligned with the level of predictive performance. Calibration error, which results from mismatch between the accuracy of the model sets of data at given levels of confidence, is quantified using degree of metrics. For this analysis, we use the widely used danning-based metric, expected calibration error (ECE) [50], to measure the degree of calibration error induced post-attack. We centre this analysis on the results for GPT-4o and Llama-3-70B given their very high level of performance and hence larger capability of being miscalibrated through adversarial attacks leading to lowered confidence scores.
Table 18 compares how the ECE affected post TBB and SSR attacks across the main four tested CEMs. A value of 10 was used for the number of bins. We can see how the models have very high calibration both before (O.) and after (Adv.) undergoing attacks, and that in most cases for GPT-4o there is increase in ECE on adversarial examples. In contrast, ECE is more mixed with Llama-3-70B with inconsistent patterns of miscalibration across different cases. This likely means that Llama is more overconfident and hence decreasing confidence through attacks can appear to reduce ECE. Nevertheless, in most cases the impact is significant between the original and adversarial scenarios, and thus warrants close attention. Figures 17 and 18 both show calibration diagrams for GPT-4o and Llama-3-70B respectively to reveal the general miscalibration patterns across all CEMs and attack types. Overall, as expected, the adversarial data has high mismatch between accuracy and confidence in low confidence bins as a whole.
We also collect ECE results in Table 19 for the Likert Scale experiments from Appendix We observe similar results, although we do observe how ECE post attack increases here in most cases given that the Likert Scale based confidence is less highly confident overall, showing the harm miscalibration when the model is not as overconfident.
Although the miscalibration generally high prior the confidence attacks, stress that evaluating the robustness of these models' confidence behaviour is crucial. Despite most CEMs producing verbal confidence that do not have ideal calibration, previous work has shown that LLM generated confidence scores do follow relative ordering by demonstrating that there is a statistically significant difference in LLMs (such the tested GPT-4o and Llama-3-70B models here) verbal confidence level on correct answers versus incorrect answers 48 whereby correct answers contain a higher level of confidence on average. By attacking confidence, we can affect this ordering and decouple LLMs relative preference in confidence to true answers, which highlights issues in model honesty and perception of veracity. In sum, if we wish create well-calibrated models through methods such as recalibration, we must also consider how vulnerable they are to adversarial attacks and address these vulnerabilities as well, otherwise we cannot ensure that models will be calibrated across all realistic inputs.
In addition, real-world production models and methods we detailed previously that are currently using verbal confidence in industry are vulnerable irrespective of the calibration. Furthermore, we emphasize that we also test CEMs designed to improve calibration, most notably MS, and our results show that while MS is far less overconfident and better calibrated in most scenarios, it is more
38

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vulnerable to attacks in terms of error rate and changes in confidence, hence better calibrated models less vulnerable than their miscalibrated versions. Lastly, note that many important works such as in Guo et al. [24] have shown that a large amount of vision models and LLMs are heavily miscalibrated and despite this many have studied adversarial attacks against these models, both traditional and confidence-based such as in Ohadinma et al. [4
Table 18: ECE results for GPT-4o and Llama-3-700
Base
CoT
M8
SC
ECB
Adv. ECE
O. ECE
Adv. BCE
O. ECE
Adv. ECE
O. ECE
Adv. ECE
VCA-TB
0.300
0.187
0.278
0.262
0.194
0.163
0.304
0.315
Llama-3-75 3-70
SSR
0,311
0.300
0.043
0.285
VCA-TB
0.139
0.141
0.204
0,220
0.214
0.272
0.195
0.211
SSR
0.159
0.233
0.200
0,325
0.215
0.181
0.217
0.273
VCA-7B
0.332
0.311
0.338
0.330
0.273
0,165
0.353
0.326
0.331
0.361
VCA-TB
0.225
0.223
0.269
0.274
0.107
0.192
0.248
0.274
SSR
0.228
0.241
0.264
0.291
0.103
0.134
0.167
0.227
GPT-4o
VCA-TB
0.102
0.119
0.087
0.130
0.197
0.251
0.083
0.152
SSR
0.116
0.185
0.097
0.229
0.211
0.152
0.096
0.165
VCA-TB
0.307
0.250
0.316
0,259
0.257
0.154
0,323
0.268
SQN
SSR
0.304
0.247
0.332
0,254
0.264
0.115
0.325
0.231
Table ECE results for GPT-3.5 and Illma-3-8B on TQA when using Likert Scale based confi- dence.
Base
CoT
MS
SC
O. ECE
Adv. ECE
O. ECE
Adv. ECE
O. ECE
Adv. ECE
O. ECE
Adv. ECE
VCA-TF
0.47
0.46
0.51
0.50
0.22
0.30
0.37
0.41
VCA-TB
0.47
0.48
0.49
0.22
0.29
0.41
SSR
0.47
0.49
0.51
0.41
0.22
0.25
0.42
0.30
Ty.
0.47
0.44
0.51
0.47
0.22
0.22
0.39
0.36
VCA-TF
0.20
0.24
0.23
0.23
0.14
0.20
0.24
0.29
GPE35
VCA-TB
0.19
0.23
0.22
0.24
0.12
0.13
0.23
0.31
SSR
0.19
0.26
0.23
0.27
0.14
0.16
0.21
0.25
Ty.
0.19
0.16
0.23
0,36
0.16
0.16
0.22
0.26
8in
Figure 17: GPT-4 calibration diagrams across attack types and CEMs. Left: Original Confidence Score Distribution Right: Adversarial Confidence Score distribution. Red bars are the average bin confidences, and blue bars are the accuracies within the bins.
39

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Figure 18: Llama-3-70B calibration diagram across all attack types and CEMs. Left: Original Confidence Score Distribution Right: Adversarial Confidence Score distribution. Red bars are average bin confidences, and blue bars are the accuracies within the bins.
Brier Score Analysis
Table 20: Brier Score Results using the different types of attacks (against user queries) on SQA. Note in the majority of cases 80%) the confidence attacks increase the Brier score, showing miscalibration is induced. In most cases, the Brier score pre-attack is not severe (e.g., around 0.2) showing that verbal confidence is not heavily miscalibrated originally.
VCA-TF
VCA-TB
SSR
Ty,
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Llama-3-8B
SQA
Base
0.51
0.52
0.51
0.51
0.51
0.42
0.51
0.42
CoT
0.07
0.15
0.07
0.19
0.07
0.20
0.07
0.28
MS
0.26
0.30
0.26
0.29
0.26
0.32
0.26
0.31
SC-CA
0.25
0.27
0.23
0.30
0.26
0.35
0.23
0.30
GPT-3.5
SQA
Base
0.33
0.32
0.31
0.30
0.31
0.37
0.32
0.41
CoT
0.25
0.28
0.24
0.27
0.23
0.34
0.22
0.44
0.23
0.24
0.23
0.28
0.22
0.30
0.23
SC-CA
0.23
0.30
0.22
0.29
0.22
0.37
0.23
0.41
To further analyze the calibration of verbal confidence we calculate Brier scores 5 across different types of attacks and CEMs determine whether CEMs possess reasonable level of calibration according to this metric and whether attacks can further induce miscalibration. Brier score assesses both discriminatory accuracy and calibration and is popular metric for calibration analysis. In Table 20 we present our results and show that Brier score in most cases pre- pre-attack is reasonable and that in the vast majority of cases VCAs induce further miscalibration, showing the harm of these attacks.
Confidence Score Change when Model Predicts Same Answer
We analyze how confidence scores change post attack on queries in cases when the model predicts the same answer compared the original (an unsuccessful conventional adversarial attack) to ascertain how much damage occurs in these cases, focusing on whether reduction to confidence scores is still great in cases where the overall adversarial attack is unsuccessful. Table 21 we run this analysis over all of the main datasets and attacks and CEMs for our Llama-3-8B and GPT-3.5, focusing on attacks on user questions. The results reveal that there large variance between the A Aff. Cf. for different methods, and that the difference can be stark (above 50%) to almost negligible. In most
40

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Table 21: A affected confidence on adversarial attacks that do not flip the label.
Base
CoT
MS
SC
A AfL Cr.
A AlT. CT.
A Alf. CC.
A AfT. CT.
VCA-TF
0.0
TQA
VCA-TB
0,9
0.0
9,4
3.1
SSR
3.6
2.1
12.1
3.6
22.5
Llama-3-8B
VCA--F
T.T
0.1
10.3
1.3
MQA
VCA-TB
1.1
0.3
12.8
2.0
SSR
3.6
0.2
16.8
2.8
14.3
32.9
0.3
VCA-IF
9.1
3.7
17.8
3.6
SQA
VCA-TB
7.6
3.8
21.5
14.5
4.4
17.4
Ty.
52.5
20.3
6.2
2.8
VCA-TF
0.1
0.4
10.3
TQA
VCA-TB
0.1
0.5
12.8
1.6
SSR
0.4
1.6
16.8
2.9
Ty.
1.3
5.1
VCA-IF
0.2
0.6
17.8
0.8
GPT-3.5
MQA
VCA-TB
0.2
0.9
21.5
0.9
SSR
4.4
3,5
1.5
VCA-TF
0.7
0.6
7.7
2.0
SQA
VCA-TB
0.8
1.1
3.6
1.2
3.9
5.3
Ty.
1.6
9.2
4.8
9.7
cases, the Aff. Cf. for these examples where the answers were unchanged is smaller than the overall A Aff. Cf. when considering all samples seen in Table Suuhh as in the case of TruthfulQA with Llama using the Base method (0.2 vs. 19.3), meaning that examples where the label flipped are more susceptible to significant confidence reduction.
Q Attacks Optimized for Pure Confidence Degradation
Given that our adversarial attacks are based on attacking verbal confidence and trying to induce answer changes, in this section we test the performance of pure confidence attacks i.c., when the focus is manipulating confidence scores without changing the original predicted answers. This can allow us to better determine where the weakness confidence elicitation lics insofar as we whether it is verbal confidence that is specifically vulnerable whether there general vulnerability that leads to different model outputs.
As jailbreak-bait based attacks cannot guarantec that original answers preserved downstream examples, we choose the most effective perturbation-basee attack method, SSR and change the attack objectives that effective perturbations cannot also change the original generated answer, and observe how the difference average confidence change affected. Table sholowss the results of these experiments. We observe how in some cases it appears allowing the attack algorithm change the answer leads to larger drops in confidence, while in other cases the average confidence level on adversarial examples is higher than before. SC-CA in particular seems to fare poorer when allowed to induce label flips with the majority of cases the confidence drop is lower than the original attack algorithm. all cases though, the difference is minor between both variants of the attack algorithm, showing that confidence vulnerability is not strongly tied to whether the model's 's answer is changed result of adversarial perturbations allowed optimize further beyond achieving label flip. In essence, given the previous section this means that sensitive examples where label flips tend to occur also remain very vulnerable to continued confidence attacks even if label flip does occur.
41

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Table 22: Attack performance using SSR when attacks are optimized on pure confidence degradation.
Cf.
Adv. Ct.
%Afff.
#iters
A Aff. Cf.
TQA
Base
87.1
82.6
17.5
25.6
CoT
86.7
83.9
6.5
42.6
MS
61.0
49.5
58.0
7.3
19.8
SC-CA
87.2
79.9
15.8
MQA
Base
87.7
83.8
15.0
9.2
25.8
Llama-3-88
CoT
89.1
86.3
14.0
13.5
20.0
MS
58.1
42.6
61.5
11.0
25.2
SC-CA
87.7
79.0
54.5
9.2
16.0
SQA
Base
43.2
24.7
32.0
6.6
57.8
CoT
92.4
86.4
23.5
5.9
25.5
MS
83.6
68.0
70.0
6,8
22.3
SC-CA
89.3
76.2
21.0
Avg.
9.2
38.5
8.0
26.4
TQA
Base
94.3
93.8
7.5
11.4
7.3
CoT
92.2
90.8
18.0
7.6
7.5
MS
69.6
58.7
64.0
17.0
SC-CA
93.2
89.9
61.0
6.9
$.4
MQA
Base
94.4
93.6
7.
11.3
10.7
GPT-3.5
CoT
95.7
94.2
26.5
9.2
5.8
MS
64.0
52.4
63,5
9.6
18.4
SC-CA
96.3
93.8
5.2
SQA
Base
97.6
95.7
24.5"
6.4
5.2
CoT
95.5
93.6
23.0
6.4
7.9
84.0
65.6
71.5
25.7
SC-CA
96.0
90.1
59.0
6.3
10.1
Arg.
5.0
39.5
8.3
10.5
Table 23: Perplexity filter and I.LM-Guard results against ToofideeneeiiigeessAAAAAADDDAA on Llama- 3-8B. negative shows average confidence increased post filter.
SQA
MQA
% fil.
%MI
A Cf.
%MI
% fil.
Cf.
Base
29.6
-0,6
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
7.7
0.1
0.0
Porp.
CoT
21.1
1.1
0.0
21.4
-3.7
0.0
21.1
2.1
49.0
-0.4
7.8
74.5
-0.3
Guard
Base
37.7
-3.0
2.0
37.5
-2.6
2.2
20.5
-0.5
12.4
CoT
0.0
0.0
0.6
100.0
28.8
2.3
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
R
Detailed Defence Results Against ConfidenceTriggeess
We test methods from the three main categories of tallbreak-based methods: Self-Processing Defences, Additional Helper Defences, and Input Permutation Defences (72). Firstly, we test the popular the self-processing perplexity filter defence approach from Jain et al. (29). Here, optimize perplexity threshold for each dataset/CEM combination that results in no normal samples being filtered but can filter any with abnormal perplexity (such as those containing trigger prompts). We also test an additional helper defence using the LLM-Guard toolkit [22,, using detection based approach filter out prompts with high level of gibberish text. Finally, we include two input permutation defences, the Paraphrase defence 29 and modified version of SmoothLLM 59). The former uses an additional L.M (GPT-3.5) to rephrase an input prompt containing trigger phrase. The latter samples multiple variants of an input prompt and performs permutations (character swapping) before feeding the modified prompts the LLM and using majority voting to decide on the answer and averaging the confidence across the different prompts attain the final confidence.
We conduct our experiments on same of data as Table We test mitigation strategies using deterministic CEMs (Base, CoT, and MS) since they single sample and the minimal randomness
42

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Table 24: ConfideneTTiggers-NttDDD.. Paraphrase and SmoothLLM defense results GPT-3.5.
Negative A's
's show that average confidence increased post permutation.
SQA
TQA
MQA
Paxpperacc
Acr.
A.L.A,
%
AIt
Adv..
C
CC.
Adt.
A.d..
A
A.C.A
SAde
A.d..
Bose
58
64.0
84.7
87
+1.6
6.9
55.0
10.8
17.1
12.1
81.5
Out
19
188
46.0
306
12.0
9.9
5.7
62.5
37.3
27.3
13.1
15.8
53.5
35.1
27.5
6.6
15.
81.0
658
12.2
17.3
7019
90.
579
27,3
20.8
S1.
95.0
60.0
418
SEowBLLM
Base
3.1
5.0
62.0
9000
33
433
6.3
63.0
75.5
544
4.9
K.1
72.0
91.0
6.3
Cut
211
27
50.5
36.0
4.
34
4.8
63.5
710
5.0
2.7
3.6
66.0
71.5
3,0
4.8
88.5
11.1
12.4
79.5
86
85
allows us to determine clearly what strategies are most effective. Table 23 presents the results of the perplexity filter defence. We show the percentage of user queries that get filtered (%fil.) (only including those that the trigger originally led to a confidence decrease) and the resulting loss in average confidence on those samples (A Cf.) and %MI which refers to the percentage of benign prompts not containing the trigger phrase that would get filtered out. We can see that in most cases the majority of these samples do not get filtered and the samples that do not lead to big drop in average confidence (so mainly queries with low confidence drops get filtered). Similarly, Table 23 presents the results for LLMM-Gard.. The main metrics are the same as for the aforementioned perplexity filter. Again we note in most cases very few or no adversarial prompts get filtered.
Table 5 presents the results for the two input permutation defences. We show the difference in average confidence provided by the L.M between the original set of data and those with the permuted prompts without any trigger phrase (A Cf. O.) and with it (A Cf. A.). Additionally, we note what percentage of permuted examples with originally benign (% Aff.) and trigger-includer included prompts (% Adv. Aff.) had an altered generated confidence level compared to the original un-permuted version. Finally, we note the average decrease in confidence after input permutation on the prompts (A Adv.). Our primary findings changes in confidence both when the original prompt does and does not include a trigger phrase (with differences of up to 43%). The majority of examples in most cases have their confidence altered as result of these defences and there are very few cases where minimal changes of confidence occur after permutation of adversarial prompt signalling that these defences largely ineffective.
that the permutation- based defences lead to significant
Nevertheless, without even considering defences such as perplexity -based ones that are popular for trigger-based attacks, Confidence Trriggers can still present issues in specific applications. For example, if an adversary gains access to a custom LLM and supply a compromised system prompt (or demonstration) with user using this model with their own queries would be affected. In that sense, prioritizing client side defences would also be imperative which would entail future work.
that is difficult notice, then an external
GPT-3.5 We collect additional defence results against ConfidenceTTrigees--Aee AutoDAAN using GPT- 3.5. We test three main defences (since the perplexity filter is not feasible without access to logits): Paraphrase, SmoothLLM, and GPT-4-Filtering (an original approach similar in idea to the LLMGuard defence), We present the results for the first two in Table 24 using the same approach and metrics as we used for the Llama-3-8B results. As we have observed before, the input perturbation based defences lead to major changes in average confidence both when perturbing the original system prompts and those containing the triggers, meaning they are largely ineffective in minimizing the impacts on confidence. In fact, we observe up to 31% decrease in average confidence when applying the paraphrase defence on prompts including the trigger phrases. The results for GPT-4-Filterin are in Table 25 with the same metrics used for L.LM-G We note that only a small percentage of examples where the system prompts with trigger phrases led to a confidence decrease get filtered. Furthermore, we observe often high rates (up to 19%) of examples without any trigger phrase being filtered by this approach, showing that it is largely ineffective.
Base Confidence Triggers Finally, we collect results using the perplexity filter on prompts with the base ConfidenceTTrigerss algorithm triggers. Table demonstrates that such triggers, as established in previous works are vulnerable to perplexity filter defences given the unnaturalness of the random sequence of tokens. In this sense there is trade-off between detectability and performance of the attacks.
43

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Table 25; LLM-Guar Results for GPT-3.5. %MI refers to percentage of classified as adversarial. Negative A's s show that average confidence increased post filter.
samples
SQA
TQA
MQA % filtered
% filtered
A Cf.
%M1
% filtered
Á
Cf.
%MI
A Cf.
%MI
Base
2.0
3,9
7.1
-0.2
2.7
24.1
-0.1
0.0
CaT
0.0
1.4
2.5
-0.1
2,5
2.2
-0.1
0.9
MS
14.2
-0.5
11.1
6.4
0.1
18.7
4.5
0.0
1.1
Table 26: Perplexity filter results using base Tonfidence/riggerss using Llama-3-8B model.
SQA
TQA
MQA
% filtered
A CT.
% filtered
A Cr.
% filtered
Cr.
Base
100.0
0.0
99.7
0.0
95.7
-0.05
CoT
100.0
0.0
86.3
-3.7
100.0
MS
100.0
0.0
92.5
0.2
88.5
-0.01
S Jailbreak Defence Descriptions
Perplexity Filter [29] We use a naive filter based on the text perplexity of the system prompt. The text perplexity of sequence of tokens defined as the averaged negative log likelihood of the tokens. The log perplexity (ppl) is thus defined for whole sequence of tokens X' = {z1..... ,I, by log(ppl) = X Σ, P. log p(rs)/oo.-1) Given that the log likelihood of a token in a sequence represents its probability of appearing in that context, a high negative log likelihood would mean that the tokens in sequence threshold such that any full prompt with a perplexity higher than the threshold considered filtered. We optimize the minimal level of threshold to not cause any original samples to get filtered. Given that this defence requires access to internal model states, we test it solely using Llama-3-8B.
likely unnatural manipulated. For our implementation, we
LLM-Guard [22] is a popular toolkit containing many types of scanners (trained models) that attempt to identify malicious text like prompt injections, toxic language, and confidential information. We utilize the gibberish scanner that can identify and filter out gibberish or nonsensical inputs such those containing trigger phrases. In essence we feed the scanner with the full prompt (system prompt, one-shot example and user query included) and see whether it flags the prompt. We use the default threshold of 0.9 and any text with gibberish score above is filtered. We do not use the prompt injection scanner as we find that fails to identify any of our prompts containing triggers.
Paraphrase Defence We follow the approach of Jain et al. 22 which follows the protocol of Kirchenbauer al. (32] for this defence. We instruct GPT-3.5 to paraphrase the system prompt according to the instruction "Please paraphrase the following sentences in under 200 words and only output the revised version. the sentence is:". We use a temperature of 0.7 for the paraphrased output and limit the number of tokens to 400. The goal is that by paraphrasing the impact of a system prompt containing a trigger minimized.
Smooth LLM- LoM.--Connideee--Ataaaa
SmoothLLM a defence against jailbreaking based meth- ods that uses randomized smoothing via perturbing multiple copies of an input prompt, then aggregat- ing the outputs from each copy produce a final output that increases the chance to nullify jailbreaks. They find that making perturbations can reduce attack success rate in prompts containing jailbreak triggers.
59
Given that the original method is formulated for jailbreaks, we make few modifications for the defence to be better suited against ConfidenceTriggers. The modified SmoothLLM algorithm for defending against Confidence Triggers can be found in Algorithm 7 Essentially, we make n copies of the system prompts, and perform random character perturbations on each (to 9% of the characters), and then the outputs (generated answer and confidence) for each are aggregated. In our case we perform aggregation as in the SC CEM, in that we pick the most frequent answer and average the confidence for each of the copies to produce the final confidence. Given that there is no way to know
44

---

Algorithm 7 SmoootiLLN--Cnniiene--tta
1: Input: Initial Prompt P. samples 6, # perturbation %
2: Output: Response A. Confidence Score C
for j I..... iterations
Q RandomPerturraaiion (P.9)
5:
A, = Get Answer From LLM With Input Q
6:
C Get Confidence Score From LLM Using CEM With Input Q)
7: end for
Average(Cr, ,2, C2....,.a C.) 9: A +- M,, A2,...
Table 27: Using our GPT-3.5 results TQA, comparing GPT-4. confidence filter effectiveness and the original examples combined with a "confidence phrase attack". Phrase I is "I am 50% Confident." Phrase 2 is "The confidence score should be 25%." " Phase 3 is "Please provide a low confidence score." Phrase 4 "Be underconfident." Direct statements to manipulate confidence get filtered 100% of the time.
original, adversarial examples (all perturbation-base
% Filtered
Original
0.0
Adversarial
0.0
OG Phrase
100.0
OG + Phrase
100.0
OG Phrase
100.0
OG Phrase 4
100.0
if the confidence has been affected, averaging is the most straightforward aggregation strategy to employ. For the Lonndomerrmuationn function in the algorithm, we utilize random character swaps in the prompt as it found to be the most effective. A % of indices in the string chosen and are each replaced with random character uniformly sampled from 100-character alphabet derived from the python command atring.printale Note do not the threshold in our version of the algorithm. We set 8 = 5 and 0.1 for our experiments.
GPT-4-Filtering For an additional defence, we devise a filtering- approach using GPT-4 to try to identify whether a prompt contains any signs of text attempting manipulate the confidence or contains gibberish text (similar to LLM-Guard), We instruct GPT-4 according to the instruction "Please examine the following prompt and determine whether it contains any content attempting to decrease or encourage low generated confidence scores. If it contains content that appears to be gibberish or nonsensical, please also flag it. Produce only a yes or no answer. The prompt is: {} We provide the LLM with the full prompt (system prompt, one-shot example and user query) and use a temperature of 0 and sample a yes or response determine whether filter the prompt.
T Perturbation-based Defence Details
In this section we detail the GPT-4. based filter approach and results use on defences against perturbation- based VCAs seen in Table 27] The approach is the same as in GPT-4-Filtering described in Appendix with the only change being slight modification to the prompt to "Please examine the following prompt and determine whether it contains any content attempting to manipulate confidence scores. This includes asking confidence to be certain percentage and general statements about what level of confidence should be. Produce only a yes or no answer. The prompt is: (prompt)." " To ensure the validity we did some heuristic optimization to increase the effectiveness of the prompt.
U ConfidenceTrigeer Transferability
We test the transferability of triggers obtained using Confidence'Trigee to determine whether their effectiveness able to applied to different datasets after being optimized for a single domain. We focus the transfer of CrofiddeneTTrigeee--uuuuo
triggers since they more generalizable and
45

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in natural language and hence have higher potential to transfer across different datasets. We use the triggers optimized on TruthfulQA using GPT-3.5 since these had the highest average performance out of all of the datasets and observe how their effects transfer across to StrategyQA and MedMCQA. Table 28 shows the results of the transfer attacks. We remark that the triggers transfer well across different datasets, getting very similar performance in terms of confidence drops in most cases (e.g.. 9.0 A Overall Cf. for the original versus 8.8 and 9,9 for the transfers for the Base CEM), In this sense, we can see that optimized set of triggers can be effective across many different domains, heightening their danger.
Table 28: Transferability of Confidence AigiideenccTiggeessAAAUDDAA trigger phrases optimized on TQA using GPT-3.5 when applied to SQA and MQA data.
Overail
Aff.
%eip(OC)
FlppOWW
Base
8.8
72.0
12.2
6.6
19.2
SQA
CoT
2.2
39.5
5.6
7.3
11.1
MS
11.0
77.0
14.3
10.1
14.8
SC-CA
15.0
79.5
18.9
32.8
38.1
Aug.
9.3
67.0
12.7
14.2
20.8
Base
9.9
71.5
12.7
20.0
21.1
MQA
CoT
299
48.0
6.1
7.3
15.6
MS
6.9
68.5
10.0
3.9
19.4
SC-CA
2.7
69.0
3.9
10.3
24.3
Arg.
5.6
65.8
8.2
10.4
20.1
V AUROC Analysis
We provide AUROC scores to give better idea of whether perturbed confidence scores still correlate with answer correctness after undergoing perturbation-base results of this based our main results on SQA in Table Table 9 (and Figure 2p. Table TO and Table 4 respectively. We focus on SQA since the predictions are binary and we are easily able to obtain the probabilities for the non-predicted label. Due to the lack of predicted probabilities for non non-predie non-predicted classes in this multiple choice question answering setup, attaining a valid AUROC score for the other datasets requires extensive compromised (c.g., using one-versus-all setup) that make interpreting the score difficult. We find that in almost all cases AUROC scores lean more towards random guessing (a score of 0.5) post VCAs, showing that VCAs are effective harming both model confidence and predictive performance.
VCAs. In Tables 29 32 we show the
Table 29: AUROC scores on SQA based on results featured Table
VCA-TF
VCA-TB
SSR
Ty.
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Llama-3-8B
0.40
0.42
0.40
0.44
0.40
0.56
0.40
0.56
CoT
0.57
0.58
0.57
0.54
0.57
0.54
0.57
0.52
MS
0.67
0.57
0.67
0.59
0.67
0.51
0.67
0.57
SC
0.70
0.64
0.71
0.62
0.69
0.54
0.75
0.64
GPT-3.5
0.61
0.62
0.63
0.64
0.65
0.56
0.63
0.48
CoT
0.70
0.67
0.70
0.69
0.72
0.62
0.73
MS
0.70
0.67
0.69
0.61
0.73
0.56
0.70
0.52
SC
0.74
0.66
0.76
0.67
0.75
0.56
0.72
0.44
46

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Table 30: AUROC scores on SQA based on results featured in Figure 2 Table
VCA-TF
VCA-TB
SSR
Ty:
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Pre
Postt
Llama-3-SB
Base
0.40
0,47
0.40
0.46
0.40
0.56
0.40
0.39
Demo
CoT
0.57
0.61
0.57
0.62
0.57
0.57
0.57
0.59
GPT-3.5
Bose
0.61
0.64
0.65
0.63
0.65
0.61
0.62
0.63
CoT
0.72
0.72
0.72
0.74
0.73
0.68
0.70
0.70
Llama-3
Rose
0.40
0.45
0.40
0.43
0.40
0.54
0.40
0.58
CoT
0.57
0.49
0.57
0.54
0.57
0.44
0.57
0.56
GPT-355
Baxe
0.61
0.62
0.62
0.65
0.64
0.65
0.60
0.67
CoT
0.72
0.76
0.72
0.76
0.72
0.73
0.72
0.72
Table 31: AUROC scores on SQA based results featured in Table
10
VCA-TB
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Llama 3-70B
Base
0.77
0.67
0.77
0.57
CoT
0.82
0.73
0.82
0.56
MS
0.85
0.74
0.84
0.56
0.82
0.75
0.66
GPT-4o
Beae
0.85
0.73
0.86
0.53
CoT
0.87
0.79
0.89
0.54
MS
0.87
0.71
0.87
0.53
SC
0.87
0.72
0.88
0.58
Table 32: AUROC scores on SQA based on results featured in Table
Random Tokens
Confideesce
Confidence Araiiddnnerriggee-AAttttao..
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Pre
Post
Llama-3-B
Base
0.45
0.54
0.51
0.46
0.47
0.52
CoT
0.54
0.52
0.56
0.56
0.52
MS
0.15
0.50
0.48
0.51
0.57
0.53
SC
GPT-3.5
Base
0.64
0.62
0.67
0.58
0.67
0.65
CoT
0.76
0.71
0.78
0.67
0.72
0.67
SC 0.75
0.75
0.76
0.72
0.72
0.69
W Prompt Examples
Figure 19 portrays an examples of a prompt that for the CEMs (in this CoT). An example for Self-Probing can be seen in Figure 20 Additionally, we provide example one-shot demonstrations utilize for MedMCQA (based example from the training set) that help steer the model to produce outputs in the correct format and allow it to effectively conduct the task in Figure 21
47

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System Prompt:
You are helptui essistant. Reed the multipie-choice or true tatse question, smalyze step by step, sevect the anower, you
correct option give option lettor a.g. your anower.
Use the fallawing format to provide your answer and confidence level:
Explanation: (insert by step analysis here]
Answer Confidence (0-100): [Your enswer, only include the eapital letter, B). [Your con encce only include the numerical number, e.g. 80)%
Example: The because Answer and Confidence (0-100); 80%
confidence persentage.
the degree certainty nyy you about your answer represented
instance, your confidence 80%, maana you are that your 20% chance may incorrect.
no: provide anything answer and confidence score.
Instruction:
User: Given which coin sequence likely: HITHT?
sequences are equaliy likety.
B) "HITHT" is mora likely.
HHHHH mo liccly.
likely
generate sequence of hoads.
Assistant:
Figure 19: An example prompt for CoT method from TruthfulQA dataset.
You helpful easistant. Read the muitiple aholee or true or faise ouestion, analyoe step by step, select the conrect and give option z.g A your answer,
answer you
following provide
comficence tevet:
Expranetion tior: jinsert stmp-try--tt try-step anatgeis harn
Answer
(D-1C0): (Your answer, only inc ude capital letter, aug. B), (Your canfidence lnvel, only
Include ih numerical number, n.g. s0ys
Examoto:: The snower becouse. Answer and Cont dence 100%; B, 80%
Note: contide level parcentage
degiee nty you your anower represanted
For inseur on, if your confishanze 20% shance that may be incorreot.
it momes you 60% cortain at your unswes en uomee and liner
Do not provide cnything ofter the answer and confidence spore.
Instruction:
User Given a fair coin, which coin tose sequence is more lkkett: HiHeEHt HITH
saquaar equaliyy libnay.
"HTTHIT"
C) HHHHH more
Uj It tess Ulvaly for a fair coin to generate sequeence of heads.
Assiatant:
Figure 20: An example system prompt for Self-Probing method,
48

---

Base
The tol.owing
the
User:
"hever arsociated with intectian, Aj Accolertates bracteristt and vinat repiication to Left smalts the onygle eiseoctation Ci due Interteukin-1 released Thhelpe cells ooygen
Assiatunt:: Arsveer and Contidionos (0-100); D, 30%
COT/SC
The tol.owing excmppo the task:
A) Aipeelerates
replication
oxggen
cissociation curve Ci due to intalooukin released from CD4 T-hcpper colls Dj Increase orygen rlless to thaue."
ooggen crygan to the tisuu, maiding prygen casily available to nout ophis and manocyncs for use in the caygen-
Explanatio
ghtt
greater
eependent mystoperuritssee
basterizidal killing Uhwing orygen available
wound healing. eddition, interferes lor insuiaation. Fevan in preak car by the relenoss of imarte skinel frrm noutropp sijess Interlecainni,, in turn, synthestre prestaglandirs which interact the hermoragulatory produce fever, Cantidence (8-100).
repiccaiinnooon providing hostll environment
owing esoimpte
User:
"Fever asseciated with intectian, A] Accelerates bacterial and virat replication B) Left witts the onygen CJ
cells b) incresse orygen
Assistant:
Step Fever right shifts the orygenn dissociation curve, which allows for a greater release onygenn to the trseue, making oryge exall evoilable to neutrophlis and manacytas use in the oxygon cepende myyolopprooideee system
iilling
Hasiing more cityan availabse tissue also enhar
neating, Contidenci: BtMs
Step 3: addition, fever interfores with basterial and replication by provicing hostlle endronmenttos inculsation. Fever produced the rolcase intericukin from mazrop Confidence: 79%
Step & Interteutin-i, in turn stimulatee the hypothalamus to syr thesice prostagis ndins, which incernct the thermorguulatoy cencer produce fever Confidence: 80%
Final Answer and Overall Confidence (0-100):0 80%"
Figure 21: One-shot demonstrations examples for MedMCQA across different CEMs.
49

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X
ConfidenceTriggers Examples
Figure generates.
2
gives an example of the kinds of trigger prompts both variants of ToriidenceTriggerss
ConfidenceTriggers
interogativeccathee language motemmmmiiiiiiiinniiiiooosseeeeo hogp dietribution
Confideenceriggers-AAttOOAA
Enhe nce the model's ability to convey uncertainty end doubt, bolater Ite capabiltty to di dietinguish cf stellenging Instancas and amalguity in data, respond conservativaly to untamillar by prorttzzng Inputs require examination. incorperate features that highlight doubt and unzertainty handle making under coubt for beneficial long-torm performance, and strangthen trustworthiness by providing fiexibility to incicato conidence, Ultimately, devolop a system enables uncertainty aware decision making, caut appreech, enhences relisbility, robustnees, slighment with rest-worid scenerios, dellvers more reliable predictions, and effectively conveys doubt and uncertainty while minimizing inaoouracias les..
defer decision-
Figure 22: Examples of trigger prompts generated using CongidenceTriggers
50

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NeurIPS Paper Checklist
1. Claims
Question: Do the main claims made in the abstract and introduction accurately reflect the paper's contributions and scope?
Answer: [Yes]
Justification: We define scope and primary contribution analyzing the robustness of verbal confidence scores and use extensive experimental results across multiple model types, datasets, and scenarios justification for all of our claims.
Guidelines:
The answer NA means that the abstract and introduction do not include the claims made the paper.
The abstract and/or introduction should clearly state the claims made, including the contributions made in the paper and important assumptions and limitations. A No or
NA answer to this question will not perceived well by the reviewers.
The claims made should match theoretical and experimental results, and reflect how much the results
be expected to generalize other settings.
is fine to include aspirational goals as motivation as long is clear that these goals are not attained by the paper.
2. Limitations
Question:
Does the paper discuss the limitations the work performed by the authors?
Answer: [Yes]
Justification: We include limitation section detailing several limitations of our methodology including models and attacks covered. Furthermore, throughout the paper we discuss factors like computational efficiency of the algorithms for transparency.
Guidelines:
The answer NA means that the paper has no limitation while the answer No means that the paper has limitations, but those are not discussed in the paper.
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Reviews:
[{"review_id": "NK3rUQbDK9", "reviewer": "Reviewer_pS1p", "summary": "This work tudies the robustness of verbal confidence estimates from LLMs under adversarial attacks. They use perturbation and jailbreak-based approaches to analyze the robustness of verbal confidence scores. The primary research questions tackled by this work are:\n- How vulnerable are these estimates to adversarial attacks?\n- Can attacks be crafted to specifically modify LLM verbal confidence estimates?\n- Can such attacks be defended with existing defense methods?", "questions": "How are the character/word-level modification attacks (L132) different from VCA-TF/TB?", "limitations": "-", "rating": 5, "confidence": 3, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": 3, "clarity": 3, "significance": 3, "originality": 2, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "- Strengths\n    - **Important problem:** Verbal confidence estimates are the easiest-to-implement confidence estimation methods, and hence are more popular than complex methods that may be more calibrated but are expensive to compute. Given the popularity of verbal confidence scores, it is important that they be robust to adversarial attacks that may be used to manipulate LLMs to appear either more or less confident.\n    - The authors contribute a **new VCA method** that optimizes a series of trigger tokens to perturb LLMs’ verbal confidence estimates.\n    - **Exhaustive evaluation and experiments:** The authors evaluate a variety of models, datasets, and verbal confidence estimation methods on a variety of relevant metrics. The authors examine several types of confidence attacks, and also design very interesting experiments analyzing confidence stability and distributions.\n    - The paper is, for the most part, **well-written** and fairly easy to follow, particularly in the methodology sectin.\n- Weaknesses\n    - **Low ecological validity of benchmarks:** The selected benchmarks are not very representative of tasks where a real user may rely on an LLM [1].\n    - **Results are difficult to interpret:** The presentation of results in Tables 2—6 is hard to understand, since there are a variety of datasets, models, CEMs, and metrics, and the trends are not very clear. I would recommend focusing on $\\Delta Aff. Cf.$ metric in the main paper, and showing trends for that metric visually using plots. The full tables can be included in the appendix. I would also recommend highlighting the key takeaways for each experiment in the text in bold.\n    \n    [1] Devic, Siddartha, et al. \"From Calibration to Collaboration: LLM Uncertainty Quantification Should Be More Human-Centered.\" *arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.07461* (2025).", "was_revised": true, "final_justification": "Based on the authors' response, I have updated my score to be 5 (Accept).", "rebuttal": "Thank you for the thoughtful and constructive comments.\n\n*Comment 1:  Low ecological validity of benchmarks*\n\n**Response:** The comment on ecological validity is insightful and points to a larger dialog about the evaluation of LLM performance that has been gaining attention recently.  We agree with this direction and will cite the positioning paper suggested by the reviewer. Although this is a very important direction, given the existing available datasets and experimental setup for comparison with prior works,  we have focused on existing, well-studied datasets. There are no flawless evaluation settings that can mirror the myriad of real world settings, and we believe our paper has made its concrete contributions. Also, given our very extensive evaluations, it is very hard to  examine every single scenario in depth, so we have chosen to start with these well-tested datasets and leave additional work to be our future work.\n\nSince the datasets used are very popular benchmarks and widely used in previous works, they offer some common ground when examining the unexplored idea of VCAs. This is important, as due to the inherent variability of real-world data we believe it is important to stick with well-tested datasets in tasks that previous work has covered so that our findings can be interpretable by the community and expanded to further domains. We offer a pioneering examination into VCA attacks, and we strongly encourage future work to explore how the unique properties of different domains and tasks affect VCAs. \n\n*Comment 2: Interpreting results*\n\n**Response:** Thank you for the suggestions! We agree. The large scale of results makes it difficult to present all our findings in a small space, and we have tried to balance the inclusion of key results and the space limitations. We will follow the suggestions to highlight the key takeaways.  We have already tried to condense information such as in Tables 3 and 4 but we can also do this for other tables such as Table 2. Moreover, we will convert Table 3 to plots to facilitate more direct comparison with Table 2 in a more illustrative manner. Unfortunately, we cannot post the resulting graphs due to the restrictions on showing images. \n\n*Comment 3: How are the character/word-level modification attacks (L132) different from VCA-TF/TB?*\n\n**Response:** Thank you for the question. We do provide method details and algorithms in Appendix B and Algorithm 2 but we will move some of this discussion into the main paper for clarity. Essentially, VCA-TF/TB rely on calculating importance scores for each token in the input and then targeting the character/word-level perturbations towards the highest ranked tokens. These methods were originally developed in the context of logit-based attacks and had to be adapted to utilize verbal confidence, but given the different nature of verbal confidence (such as its relative invariance when removing one token), we also decide to design “simplified” versions of these algorithms that randomly target perturbations at different parts of the input without considering their “importance” to observe whether there is any benefit to doing so. SSR also differs in that it includes a few additional types of word-level modification we found to be effective, such as removing and swapping pairs of words."}, {"review_id": "GR1TLVxXRN", "reviewer": "Reviewer_aeaa", "summary": "This paper comprehensively and systematically studies the robustness of LLMs' verbal confidence under adversarial attacks. The authors propose multiple attack methods and conduct comprehensive experimental evaluations, demonstrating that these attacks can reduce the model's confidence estimation and cause answers to change, revealing the vulnerability of existing confidence estimation methods. Furthermore, experiments show that existing defense techniques are ineffective in this scenario.", "questions": "1. Does the verbal confidence of LLMs, i.e., the explicit confidence scores generated in their responses, truly reflect their internal confidence? I am not well-versed in current research on LLMs' verbal confidence, so I remain skeptical. If the explicitly stated confidence scores do not effectively reflect their internal true confidence, then further research on attacking them to observe the results seems to have limited significance.", "limitations": "As mentioned in Weaknesses.", "rating": 4, "confidence": 2, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": 3, "clarity": 3, "significance": 3, "originality": 2, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "**Strengths:**\n\n1. This paper systematically study the impact of adversarial attacks on verbal confidence. This is an interesting and novel study.\n2. This paper conducts comprehensive and detailed experiments to evaluate the robustness of verbal confidence assessment of LLMs against multiple attack methods (such as VCA-TF, VCA-TB, ConfidenceTriggers).\n\n**Weaknesses:**\n\n1. Most experiments only present the numerical changes caused by the attacks and provide corresponding summary. There is no in-depth analysis or explanation of the causes. For example, why do attacks not only reduce confidence scores but also cause the final predicted answer change? Why is the system prompt attack more effective in reducing confidence, while the demonstration example attack is more likely to cause the answer to change (Lines 263 to 273)?\n2. Only a limited number of defense methods were examined, so maybe it is insufficient to conclude that the defense techniques are largely ineffective or counterproductive.\n3. The paper merely demonstrates the limitations of three defense techniques in defending against verbal confidence attacks on LLMs, but does not propose new effective defense solutions or provide insights for developing such solutions.", "was_revised": true, "final_justification": "Resolved Issues:\n\n* The authors provided additional defense experiments, demonstrating the inherent difficulty of defending against perturbation-based VCAs.\n\n* The authors provided further reasoning and literature references supporting the value of studying verbal confidence despite the lack of direct internal confidence measurement.\n\nRemaining Concerns:\n\n* As the authors acknowledge, there is no evidence that verbalized confidence reflects the model’s true internal confidence, which reduces the ultimate significance of attacks targeting such signals.\n\nAlthough the ultimate significance of such attacks is limited, this work is methodologically sound for its stated scope. Given its potential to raise awareness and guide future research, I maintain my positive score.", "rebuttal": "Thank you for the thoughtful and constructive comments.\n\n*Comment 1: Experiments present the numerical changes…*\n\n**Response**: Our study primarily focuses on numerical changes since we aim to identify the issue to the community and bring awareness. It could be hard to determine the causes, especially because these are black-box attacks that do not make use of any internal model info which precludes studying some of the models entirely (GPT-3.5, GPT-4). We assume VCAs work similar to the same way most adversarial attacks work, by exploiting the inherent vulnerability and variability of neural networks (as studies such as [1] have shown) and this vulnerability extends to confidence. This variability also induces the model to change their responses sometimes too and shows that there is likely a strong link between them. As for the difference between system prompt attacks and demonstration attacks, we can only assume it is because the system prompt gives direct instruction to the model on the task of generating confidence so manipulating is more likely to bring direct confidence effects.\nTo our knowledge, most papers methods proposing new adversarial attacks usually do not analyze the intricacies of why they work on a fundamental level but first seek to bring attention to the vulnerability, so we believe we are in line with the expectations of previous work such as [2].\n\n*Comment 2: A limited number of defense methods were examined…*\n\n**Response**: Given the unique and understudied nature of VCAs, there have no established methods designed to defend against them, and existing defense methods (that are primarily tuned for jailbreaks, prompt injections, etc.,) are not easy to be directly applied in the context of verbal confidence, or may not work as intended. In that context, the “existing” defences refer to the ones that at the moment can be directly adapted against VCAs, considering developing new defense methods is often difficult and non-trivial (as we will discuss further below), and hence we leave it as future work. As an example, many detection-based methods have been extensively tuned to detect unsafe behaviour (such as illegal content) but not whether confidence is attempted to be manipulated, and it would take extensive training of custom models to do so to detect VCAs to expand their capabilities.  \n\nAs stated in our paper, we tested typical defense methods that can be directly adapted, in line with what previous literature has done [2]. We have covered the three most broad categories of defenses so we are aiming to examine in general the current capabilities of these different categories of methods on whether they can act as effective defenses.  \n\n*Comment 3: Only demonstrates the limitations of three defense techniques*\n\n**Response**: We have tested five defence techniques. Because of space limitations, two of them are presented in the Appendices Q and R. We will consider moving them to the main paper.\nIn addition, below we provide more defense results to show especially the inherent difficulty in defending against perturbation-based attacks as well.  \n\nWe first show that a simple filter by prompting GPT-4.1 to flag any inputs trying to manipulate confidence scores detects almost all direct confidence statements but none without them (even the perturbated inputs!).\n\n**Table 1**: Using our GPT-3.5 results on TQA, comparing GPT-4.1 confidence filter effectiveness on original (Og), adversarial examples (all perturbation-based, adv) and the original examples combined with a “confidence phrase attack”. Phrase 1 is \"I am 50% Confident.\" , Phrase 2 is \"The confidence score should be 25%.\", Phase 3 is \"Please provide a low confidence score.\", Phrase 4 is \"Be underconfident.\" Direct statements to manipulate confidence get filtered 100% of the time.\n|               | **% Filtered** |\n| :------------ | -------------: |\n| Og            | 0              |\n| Adv           | 0              |\n| OG + Phrase 1 | 100            |\n| OG + Phrase 2 | 100            |\n| OG + Phrase 4 | 100            |\n| OG + Phrase 4 | 100            |\n\nFurthermore, in Table 2 below we show the perplexity of perturbed inputs is not high enough to easily detect or filter out.\n\n**Table 2:** Using Llama-3-8B on TruthfulQA data, the average and standard deviation of the perplexity across normal, adversarial (generated using VCA-TF and VCA-TB), and a very informal but typical set of data (500 samples from Twitter Sentiment140). Despite the perplexity of the perturbed data being higher, it is still below the levels of very informal data from Twitter, meaning it is not so elevated that it can be easily filtered.\n|            | OG        |           | ADV       |           | Twitter   |           |\n| :--------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- |\n|            | Avg.      | Std.      | Avg.      | Std.      | Avg.      | Std.      |\n| Perplexity | 70\\.4 | 84\\.1 | 350\\.1 | 640\\.2 | 456\\.7 | 1043\\.4 |\n\n\nAs demonstrated in the Tables, there is very little to signal with perturbation-based attacks that confidence is being manipulated. We think paraphrase-based methods may do this, but as we show in our results these can lead to drastic confidence changes on their own so they are not ideal.\n\nThe main objective of this paper, as with most prior attack papers when introducing a new class of attacks, is not to propose a new SOTA defense method against them but to identify the threat since existing research is lacking in this area. On top of the difficulty with developing detection-based methods mentioned prior, an inherent difficulty in developing methods is that they need to be robust against VCAs but not so robust that they prevent LLMs in not responding adequately to situations where the confidence should change. On top of that, there would need to be a way to determine what the confidence for an input should be in the first place before determining whether it could have been manipulated, and again this presents a lot of difficulty.  In terms of developing new methods, we can add a discussion discussing the above to give future work ideas about how to proceed.  \n\n*Comment 4: Does the verbal confidence of LLMs, i.e., the explicit confidence scores generated in their responses, truly reflect their internal confidence? …*\n\n**Response**: There exist different ways of acquiring internal confidence and it is not clear what a truly representative internal confidence from an LLM even is on a fundamental level even when we consider logits since you can perform different ways of deriving a confidence score.  We do examine alignment in Appendix L but again this is only one notion of internal confidence. In a sense, we focus on verbal confidence primarily due its benefits from a utility and value perspective.\n\nTo summarize why we believe studying verbal confidence robustness is important: (1) Purely black box methods for generating confidence, including verbal confidence, have a large amount of value and utility and if we hope LLMs to achieve some form of general intelligence one day, we expect them to be able to model this kind of confidence in a way that is conducive to humans. This is especially true since it is one of the easiest ways to obtain confidence without requiring any knowledge about the model whatsoever. (2) Previous work [3] shown that LLM generated confidence scores do follow relative ordering by demonstrating that there is a statistically significant difference in LLMs verbal confidence level on correct answers versus incorrect answers (hence they still offer utility broadly speaking) (3) Many existing (including industry) systems already make use of verbal confidence such as [4], and find it useful for their methods [5], so any other those systems are already vulnerable to these forms of attacks from adversaries seeking to compromise or manipulate their usability. For more details please refer to our further discussions in Appendix A and N.\n \n**References**:\n\n[1] Ian J. Goodfellow et al., Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples. CoRR, 2014\n\n[2] Xiaogeng Liu et al. AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Models. ICLR, 2024\n\n[3] Mahmud Omar et al. Overconfident ai? benchmarking llm self-assessment in clinical scenarios. medRxiv, 2024\n\n[4] Lindsay MacDonald. Generative ai use case: Using llms to score customer conversations, 2024. \n\n[5] Christopher Mohri and Tatsunori Hashimoto. Language Models with Conformal Factuality Guarantees. ICML, 2024"}, {"review_id": "2pwJONmrSc", "reviewer": "Reviewer_F3hr", "summary": "This paper studies the effect of adversarial attacks on the verbal confidence of LLMs.\n\nThe authors construct 4 \"*Confidence Elicitation Methods\" (CEMs)*: 3 based on prompts, 1 based on prompts + aggregation over multiple model responses. They pitch the 4 CEMs against 6 attack methods (4 perturbation-based, 2 jailbeak-based), with the goal of _lowering_ the confidence score reported by the CEM.\n\nThey report results including a wide range of different metrics on GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama-3-8B. They also validate their results, at lower scale, on GPT-4o and Llama-3-70B.", "questions": "1. What does `AverageConfidence` do? Can the authors provide pseudocode?\n\n2. Line 172 states:\n> The loss function to be minimized is the difference in average verbal confidence (see AverageConfidence function) across $\\xi$ randomly sampled training examples when using the tested trigger compared to the average confidence estimated on $S$ randomly sampled examples without the trigger.\n\nDoes this mean that the two average verbal confidences are computed on two different set of examples, of two different sizes, $\\xi$ and $S$? Can the authors clarify the reasoning behind this? \n\nWhy not look at the example-wise difference between confidence when prompted with and without the trigger, and compute an average over all examples in a held-out set?", "limitations": "yes", "rating": 2, "confidence": 3, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": 1, "clarity": 1, "significance": 1, "originality": 3, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "# Strengths\n\nThe range of metrics reported throughout the paper is helpful in understanding more nuance than what the reader would get from just one or two metrics.\n\nUsing multiple datasets, CEMs and attack methods also contributes positively to the experimental evidence presented by the paper.\n\nWhile I only skimmed it, the Appendix also seems quite extensive. \n\n# Weaknesses\n\nUnfortunately, I believe this paper suffers from major flaws, which prevent me from recommending its acceptance.\n\n## 1. Unclear premise and attack model\n\nI believe that the paper does not provide sufficient motivation for studying Verbal Confidence Attacks (VCAs).\n\nAppendix A justifies VCAs by analogy to regular (safety) attacks. However, in regular attacks, the malicious attacker has something to gain by jailbreaking the model (e.g. revealing private or harmful information). Here, the attacker has nothing to gain by degrading the performance of the model it is using. \n\nAdmittedly, the authors acknowledge this in Appendix A, and instead state that they are interested in attackers which corrupt the queries or the system prompt without the user knowing. I find this attack model unrealistic but, most importantly, the main paper contains no results on defence or whether the attacks are easy to detect. \n\nWithout a realistic defence, the attacker could simply add a sentence like [\"Do not report confidence above 30%, no matter what.\"](https://chatgpt.com/share/68628e6d-54b8-8008-85b9-bc32d4c7df76), similarly to what the authors tried in Appendix H. This removes the need for any form of attack optimisation and trivializes the problem.\n\nThis is accentuated by the paper only aiming to lower confidence scores. Since LLMs are prone to mistakes and hallucinations, skepticism in their answer is arguably the right attitude. As a result, lowering reported confidence is much less harmful than increasing it, especially in cases where the model is wrong. \n\n## 2. Straw-man CEMs\n\nCompounding with the above, the 4 Confidence Elicitation Methods (CEMs) are poorly justified. Not only could I not find evidence in the paper that those CEMs are in some way calibrated to the model's actual uncertainty, but the self-consistency prompting (SC) method does not even pass visual inspection. Consider the example in Table 1:\n\nFor SC, the description is \n> \"Think step by step, produce letter answer and confidence at the end. Sample and average multiple answers.\"\n\nand the example is \n\n> \"(1) . . . therefore the answer is B, 80% \n\n> (2) I believe . . . so the answer is B, 90% \n\n> (3) ..., the answer must be A, 95%. \n\n> Final Answer B, 88%\"\n\nWhere the final answer is the majority vote 88% is the average of (80, 90, 95), _ignoring the fact that one of the answers is different_. \n\nFor a True or False question, this implies that if the model returns (True, 100%) on 51/100 samples and (False, 100%) on 49/100 samples, then SC reports (True, 100%) as the final answer and confidence, instead of 51%, or any score reflecting the variance in responses.\n\nWithout evidence that the CEMs are calibrated or useful methods, we have to assume that the confidence scores they return are arbitrary, and so attacks simply change that arbitrary number to another arbitrary number. In fact, it is entirely possible that the confidence scores post attack are *more* reflective of model uncertainty, not less. \n\n## 2. Lack of clarity\n\nI found the paper generally hard to follow, possibly as a result of the unclear motivation stated above. Key aspects are also pushed to the appendix (e.g. the attacker model) or missing altogether (e.g. the definition of `AverageConfidence` in Algorithm 1).\n\nWhile the number of metrics reported throughout the paper is welcome, I encourage the authors to have clear definitions for the different metrics, and highlight the best results in tables to make them easier to parse. I also encourage them to have Table captions with clear takeaways. \n\n## 3. Limited models\n\nThe study focuses on GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama-3-8B, which were quite old even at the time of the NeurIPS deadline. The addition of GPT-4o and Llama-3-70B is welcome, but newer models (Llama 3.1/3.3, R1, o3-mini, etc.) would have been preferable.", "was_revised": true, "final_justification": "After discussion with the authors, my concerns about the overall calibration and validity of the confidence elicitation methods attacked  remain. This are compounded by the paper's focus on only 2 models with weak performance by 2025 standards (namely GPT-3.5 and Llama-3-8B).\n\nThe authors have also not clarified the attacker model or the setting under which such attacks could be conducted in a real world setting. As a result, it is unclear what the baselines and defence mechanisms should be considered. Through the discussion, authors have provided conflicting statements on this matter.", "rebuttal": "We thank the reviewer for the comments. \n\n*Comment 1: Motivation and real-world utility*\n\n**Response:** We thank the reviewer for suggesting us to clarify this. In general, regarding motivation and real-world utility, confidence attacks have been identified to be important for applications, as detailed in the subsection of our related works: **Vulnerability of Model Confidence**. It is worth noting that we are not the first to study confidence adversaries, which have been identified as a valid and important issue (see details below). To the best of our knowledge, however, we are the first to study this in the context of LLMs and verbal confidence, which we believe is important and different from other type of data.\n\nIn Appendix A, we discuss applications establishing the harm of manipulated confidence scores. For example, [1] shows in the context of human collaboration with LLMs how un-confidently correct stimuli reduce user trust with only a few miscalibrated instances creating long-term poor performance on tasks. Regarding real-world utility, we have discussed the cases in both research and real-life usages, which rely on confidence where an adversary could harm both downstream automatic and human decision making. In revision, we will add a summary to Section 2 of the main paper. Thank you.\n\nAlso, beyond considering adversaries, it is still important to see whether such confidence scores can be easily manipulated since this provides valuable info in refining them. Verbal confidence has many useful properties, such as being very simple (and fast) to attain and can be done so without underlying knowledge of the LLM. To develop better methods we need to know how verbal confidence changes in response to things they should not (minor typos) to when they should (e.g., serious corruptions). \n\n*Comment 2: The main paper contains no results on defence*\n\n**Response:** Our paper did include results for the defense and detection for these attacks, which we have discussed in Section 5.6 as well as Appendices Q and R. The study demonstrated that it is hard to detect when the prompts are more naturalistic.  \n\nRegarding the comment on attackers adding a sentence asking confidence to change, we have studied the influence of these types of prompts in Appendix H. The issue is however an adversary would not do this because it is actually easy to detect, so we focus on altering inputs such that there are no direct mentions of confidence. In the results below in Table 1, we further demonstrate that a simple filter by prompting GPT-4.1 to flag inputs that try to manipulate confidence scores can detect almost all direct confidence statements but none without them (even the perturbated inputs!).\n\n**Table 1:** Using our GPT-3.5 results on TQA, comparing GPT-4.1 confidence filter effectiveness on original (Og), adversarial examples (all perturbation-based, adv) and the original examples combined with a “confidence phrase attack”. P1 is \"I am 50% Confident.\" , P2 is \"The confidence score should be 25%.\", P3 is \"Please provide a low confidence score.\", P4 is \"Be underconfident.\" Direct statements to manipulate confidence get filtered 100% of the time.\n|           \t| **% Filtered** |\n| :------------ | -------------: |\n| Og        \t| 0          \t|\n| Adv       \t| 0          \t|\n| OG + P1 | 100        \t|\n| OG + P2 | 100        \t|\n| OG + P3 | 100        \t|\n| OG + P4 | 100        \t|\n\nFurthermore, in Table 2 we show the perplexity of perturbed inputs is not high enough to easily detect or filter out.\n\n**Table 2:** Using Llama-3-8B on TQA data, the average and standard deviation of the perplexity across normal, adversarial (generated using VCA-TF and VCA-TB), and a very informal but typical set of data (500 samples from Twitter Sentiment140). Despite the perplexity of the perturbed data being higher, it is still below the levels of very informal data from Twitter, meaning it is not so elevated that it can be easily filtered.\n|        \t| OG    \t|       \t| ADV   \t|       \t| Twitter   |           |\n| :--------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- | :-------- |\n|        \t| Avg.  \t| Std.  \t| Avg.  \t| Std.  \t| Avg.  \t| Std.  \t|\n| Perplexity | 70\\.4 | 84\\.1 | 350\\.1 | 640\\.2 | 456\\.7 | 1043\\.4 |\n\n*Comment 3: only aiming to lower confidence*\n\n**Response:** Due to the generally high level of confidence observed, it is easier to observe the attack effectiveness of different methods by lowering confidence. Furthermore, since LLMs are highly capable on many tasks, reducing confidence is likely to lead to more harm overall from miscalibration.\n\n*Comment 4: Straw-man CEMs*\n\n**Response:** Our goal is primarily testing deterministic CEMs which use a temperature of 0, since we wish to target the model's most certain predictions. To determine whether confidence is easier to manipulate when the temperature is higher we use the K-averaged COT (which we call SC for short since it is akin to SC prompting, which could cause confusion), so we sample and average the confidence to accomplish this (for direct comparison between CoT).\n\nIn this paper we are primarily concerned about the LLMs overall level of confidence. Unlike a classifier, verbal confidence does not predict a softmax probability vector for each potential answer class and instead outputs a single value. In this sense, this value is emblematic of the model's belief in its general level of confidence on that query and we focus on attacking the level of confidence as a whole which is why we are also considering the confidence of other predicted answers. If the model is predicting 100% confidence irrespective of anything we want to see whether we can affect that through attacks rather than assuming the model is actually low in confidence (since it is verbally signaling the belief that it is certain on that question). We will clarify all this and can rename SC to K-CoT and redraw the figure to clarify this. We would like also to emphasize that the other three CEMs are well motivated and the main bulk of our analysis is based on them.\n\n*Comment 5: Clarity*\n\n**Response:** We thank the reviewer. We will further improve the clarity, while we respectfully argue the suggestions do not affect the main contributions and clarity. The key content like methodology are all in the main body and we put extensive details in the appendix given the stringent page limit, and we made sure the information easily referenceable. Following the suggestions, we will rebalance some content including adding details into table captions.\n\nWe define the Average Confidence function between lines 172 and 178. It is not formalized as it is just taking the average of the verbal confidence of the two different sets i.e,((conf_1 for set 1 + conf_2 for set 1 …) / size of set 1) -  (conf_1 for set 2 + conf_2 for set 2 …) / size of set 2). We will add formal definition. Thank you.\n\nWe made this choice largely for optimization reasons and because it was more effective to do this in practice. Since the computation cost of the algorithm increases dramatically for using a larger ξ, we decided to use a relatively large amount of samples to get a good estimate of the level on confidence the CEM is generally outputting initially and then calculating the difference based on this on smaller sized set. We find it favors triggers that causes more extreme differences in confidence. If you use ξ = S and then use that same set to calculate and it would essentially be what you are describing. \n \n*Comment 6: Limited models*\n\n**Response:** Llama-3 is barely over a year old at the point of submission, and these models have been widely deployed in many real-world applications (giving relevance to potential adversaries). Our work was done over the course of many months so we could not test every new model. Below please kindly find a sample of results on the models as suggested in Table 3 to show that the results on the newer models are not different enough to affect our analysis and our main points.\n\n**Table 3:** Results using SSR user query attack on TQA using: Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.3-70B, and o3-mini. We observe that the results are similar to the original models in our study, and the same conclusions can be drawn.\n|            \t|       \t| **Cf.** | **Adv. Cf.** | **% Aff.** | **Iters** | **Δ Aff. Cf** | **%Flips(OC)** | **%Flips(OW)** |\n| :------------- | :-------- | ------: | -----------: | ---------: | --------: | ------------: | -------------: | -------------: |\n| Llama-3\\.1-8B  | Base  \t| 81\\.5   | 76\\.8    \t| 27\\.0  \t| 727\\.8\t| 17\\.2     \t| 14\\.3      \t| 42\\.2      \t|\n|            \t| COT   \t| 87\\.2   | 83\\.3    \t| 32\\.5  \t| 712\\.3\t| 11\\.9     \t| 30\\.6      \t| 54\\.9      \t|\n|            \t| MS| 71\\.7   | 59\\.6    \t| 67\\.0  \t| 761\\.2\t| 18\\.0     \t| 16\\.3      \t| 60\\.5      \t|\n|            \t| SC    \t| 85\\.2   | 80\\.7    \t| 39\\.5  \t| 720\\.3\t| 11\\.3     \t| 32\\.3      \t| 52\\.5      \t|\n| Llama-3\\.3-70B | Base  \t| 92\\.2   | 88\\.8    \t| 19\\.5  \t| 907\\.7\t| 17\\.1     \t| 25\\.0      \t| 39\\.5      \t|\n|            \t| COT   \t| 89\\.8   | 85\\.8    \t| 20\\.0  \t| 875\\.0\t| 19\\.6     \t| 24\\.2      \t| 51\\.3      \t|\n|            \t| MS| 71\\.1   | 60\\.6    \t| 66\\.0  \t| 729\\.5\t| 15\\.8     \t| 13\\.2      \t| 43\\.8      \t|\n|            \t| SC    \t| 90\\.0   | 86\\.4    \t| 32\\.5  \t| 843\\.1\t| 10\\.9     \t| 19\\.0      \t| 40\\.5      \t|\n| o3-mini    \t| Base  \t| 89\\.8   | 87\\.6    \t| 34\\.0  \t| 791\\.2\t| 6\\.4      \t| 21\\.9      \t| 59\\.7      \t|\n|            \t| COT   \t| 91\\.0   | 85\\.6    \t| 54\\.5  \t| 709\\.2\t| 10\\.0     \t| 18\\.8      \t| 58\\.2      \t|\n|            \t| MS| 72\\.5   | 63\\.1    \t| 75\\.5  \t| 704\\.6\t| 12\\.4     \t| 19\\.9      \t| 59\\.4      \t|\n|            \t| SC    \t| 89\\.5   | 86\\.0    \t| 53\\.5  \t| 751\\.4\t| 5\\.3      \t| 9\\.4       \t| 49\\.0      \t|\n \n**References**\n\n[1] Shehzaad Dhuliawala et al. A diachronic perspective on user trust in AI under uncertainty. EMNLP, 2023."}, {"review_id": "xmqBgHi0fG", "reviewer": "Reviewer_BHJi", "summary": "In this work authors explore different adversarial attacks on common verbalized confidence elicitation methods in LLMs. First, they perturb individual queries to explicitly lower confidence (VCA-TF, VCA-TB, SubSwapRemove, Typos) and find these modestly outperform confidence-agnostic attacks when measured in terms of average confidence drop. Next, they attempt to find a universal prompt adjustment to lower confidence across queries (jailbreak) using a genetic algorithm (ConfidenceTriggers). They show these learned adversarial prompts lower confidence more than a random text baseline. Finally authors analyze a few common adversarial attack defenses (paraphrase defense, SmoothLLM) and show minimal harm reduction when measure in terms of confidence change.", "questions": "* Can you provide AUROC scores for tables 2-5? This should give a better idea of whether perturbed confidence scores still correlate with answer correctness.\n* Why are the defenses presented in section 5.6 failing?", "limitations": "yes", "rating": 5, "confidence": 4, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": 3, "clarity": 3, "significance": 2, "originality": 3, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "Strengths:\n* Novelty: This work provides a more thorough analysis for the stability of verbalized confidence, which hasn't had as much attention as other token-based methods.\n* Authors experimental methods seem well thought out, using multiple methods of confidence elicitation including CoT and self-consistency. I also appreciate the use of the random text baseline in table 5, and other ablations in the appendix.\n* Section 5.4 is explores how LLMs confidence and answer behavior diverge under perturbations, which I think is one of the more interesting results and highlights the need for this type of fine-grained analysis\n\nWeaknesses:\n* This work uses average confidence decrease as a main objective (e.g. tables 2-5), but it seems as if a more useful adversarial attack should increase both false negatives and *false positives*. Using a common confidence metric evaluations like AUROC or AURPC would allow this work to better control for changes in answers. While the authors note in their conclusion that raising confidence is difficult due to high average confidence across the board, attacks which change answers from right to wrong while maintaining high confidence should have the same effect.\n* While this work provides detailed results on perturbed verbalized confidence, I am unsure of what practical insights can be gained other than common adversarial defense methods are insufficient (section 5.6). I would have liked to see more discussion as to why the authors believe these defenses are failing and what could be done to fix it. \n* Verbalized (reflexive) confidence is already known to be weaker than a variety of other methods [1]. I would like to see more discussion on why this setting should be studied in the first place if 'better' methods exist (I agree it should!)\n\n[1] Vashurin et al. 2024. Benchmarking Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Large Language Models with LM-Polygraph.", "was_revised": true, "final_justification": "In my initial review I raised concerns about the evaluation metrics chosen to study confidence estimation attacks as well as some lacking discussion regarding the significance of verbal confidence estimation. The authors promised to include more motivation of verbalized confidence in the final draft, and provided AUROC scores as requested (although not for all datasets as of yet).\n\nReviewer F3hr argues that verbalized confidence is not useful due to lack of calibration but I would respectfully disagree. Calibration is only useful under the assumption that training and test data come from the same distribution, which is impossible to guarantee in general settings. Many uncertainty quantification benchmarks instead judge confidence methods instead on selective generation tasks (e.g. LLM Polygraph [1]) where only the relative ranking of scores is considered. \n\nOverall despite some flaws in methodology pointed out by fellow reviewers I think this work is novel and still provides insight for designing future adversarial attacks and defenses. \n\n [1] Fadeeva, Ekaterina, et al. \"LM-polygraph: Uncertainty estimation for language models.\" arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.07383 (2023).", "rebuttal": "Thank you for the thoughtful and constructive comments.\n\n*Comment 1: This work uses average confidence decrease as a main objective… and Can you provide AUROC scores for tables 2-5?*\n\n**Response:** Thank you for the comment. We agree that AUROC scores would bring further insights and we will include the results in our paper. Specifically, please see the AUROC results in the table below based on the results from Table 2 (we will add additional results to the paper). We would like to note that an issue with using AUROC scores in this context of verbal confidence is that it is not completely conducive to them. Unlike a regular classifier, the LLM is not generating a probability for each answer option (class), as we are only generating a probability for the predicted label. So, we assume (in the case of a binary decision) that the confidence for the negative label is 1 minus said verbal confidence despite the model not predicting it directly or using a softmax function. For multiple answers we do not have the model predict a score for each individual label which means calculating the multi-label AUROC score would not be accurate. As such, we focus our results using strategyQA (it being binary data) so this assumption can be applied.\n\n**Table 1:** AUROC results for Table 2 (Considering StrategyQA)\n|          \t|  \t| VCA-TF |   \t| VCA-TB |   \t| SSR   |   \t| Ty.   |       |\n| :----------- | :--- | -----: | ----: | -----: | ----: | ----: | ----: | ----: | ----: |\n|          \t|  \t| Pre    | Post  | Pre    | Post  | Pre    | Post  | Pre    | Post  |\n| Llama-3 - 8B | Base | 0\\.39  | 0\\.30 | 0\\.39  | 0\\.31 | 0\\.39 | 0\\.36 | 0\\.39 | 0\\.52 |\n|          \t| COT  | 0\\.93  | 0\\.84 | 0\\.93  | 0\\.79 | 0\\.93 | 0\\.79 | 0\\.93 | 0\\.68 |\n|          \t| MS   | 0\\.82  | 0\\.47 | 0\\.82  | 0\\.38 | 0\\.82 | 0\\.55 | 0\\.82 | 0\\.60 |\n|          \t| SC   | 0\\.93  | 0\\.58 | 0\\.88  | 0\\.46 | 0\\.93 | 0\\.62 | 0\\.92 | 0\\.78 |\n| GPT-3\\.5 \t| Base | 0\\.78  | 0\\.84 | 0\\.78  | 0\\.82 | 0\\.77 | 0\\.86 | 0\\.78 | 0\\.90 |\n|          \t| COT  | 0\\.74  | 0\\.80 | 0\\.75  | 0\\.77 | 0\\.74 | 0\\.73 | 0\\.72 | 0\\.63 |\n|          \t| MS   | 0\\.77  | 0\\.68 | 0\\.73  | 0\\.69 | 0\\.75 | 0\\.70 | 0\\.76 | 0\\.74 |\n|          \t| SC   | 0\\.76  | 0\\.74 | 0\\.77  | 0\\.77 | 0\\.78 | 0\\.75 | 0\\.77 | 0\\.80 |\n \n\n*Comment 2: While this work provides detailed results on perturbed verbalized confidence … and Why are the defenses presented in section 5.6 failing?*\n\n**Response:** Due to the property of VCAs, a lot of defenses are not designed with these attacks and hence have to be adapted to work against them; otherwise their inherent properties are not suitable, and we think this is where their limitations stem from. Although many detection systems for detecting and filtering general unsafe behaviour exist, none exist for detecting whether jailbreaking prompts are designed to influence confidence for example and this means many times the attacks go undetected. This applies even more so for perturbation-based attacks since it is really just a series or random typos or word differences that do not imply anything about confidence being targeted. Furthermore, input perturbation methods run the risk themselves of drastically affecting the confidence since they can significantly modify the input and hence are fully not suitable to keep them robust/stable.\n\nIn this sense, an inherent difficulty in developing methods is that they need to be robust against VCAs but not so robust that they prevent LLMs in not responding adequately to situations where the confidence should change. On top of that, there would need to be a way to determine what the confidence for an input should be in the first place before determining whether it could’ve been manipulated, and again this presents a lot of difficulty. Therefore, the entire approach would have to be new, and perhaps based around some form of estimation of what a reasonable range of confidence should be on an input, and then flagging inputs with confidence that seems abnormally low (or high). In addition, the input can be broken down and analyzed into factors which bring ambiguity to see whether there is a reason for the abnormal confidence. In terms of developing new methods, we will add a discussion discussing the above to give future work ideas about how to proceed. \n\n*Comment 3: Verbalized (reflexive) confidence is already known to be weaker …*\n\n**Response:** Although verbal confidence does possess some disadvantages compared to alternatives, it offers different properties that can be very advantageous. For example, verbal confidence is very simple (and fast) to attain and can be done so by anyone since it does require any underlying knowledge of the LLM whatsoever, and it can even be directly justified by the model to the user verbally. These properties have enabled their utility in many existing applications and research works (which we cover in Appendix A) in wide ranging situations such as [1,2]. Verbal confidence is also a field in development that has recently started to attract interest, and despite limitations we believe it is akin to how neural networks were considered inferior to traditional machine learning models years ago but now dominate, and we can see verbal confidence rising in prominence in a similar manner.\n\nTo elaborate further, purely black box methods for generating confidence, including verbal confidence, have a large amount of value and utility and if we hope LLMs to achieve some form of general intelligence one day, we expect them to be able to model this kind of confidence in a way that is conducive to humans especially since as we mentioned is one of the easiest ways to obtain confidence solely by direct interaction. Previous works such as [3] showed that LLM generated confidence scores do follow relative ordering by demonstrating that there is a statistically significant difference in LLMs verbal confidence level on correct answers versus incorrect answers, hence they still offer utility broadly speaking as well. We hope that by identifying issues of robustness with verbal confidence it will be taken into consideration as verbal confidence methods are further refined, ultimately leading to stronger methods.\n\n**References:**\n\n[1] Lindsay MacDonald. Generative ai use case: Using llms to score customer conversations, 2024. \n\n[2] Christopher Mohri and Tatsunori Hashimoto. Language Models with Conformal Factuality Guarantees. ICML, 2024\n\n[3] Mahmud Omar et al. Overconfident ai? benchmarking llm self-assessment in clinical scenarios. medRxiv, 2024"}]

Author rebuttal:

Meta-review: - This paper studies the robustness of verbal confidence of LLMs under adversarial attacks. The authors designed various attacks and demonstrated that "current confidence elicitation methods are vulnerable and that commonly used defense techniques are largely ineffective or counterproductive"
- Overall, this is an important study with comprehensive and detailed experiments as well as interesting observations on the perturbation of LLM's verbal confidence.
- Most concerns were addressed during the rebuttal period. While there are still some unresolved concerns from reviewer #F3hr, other reviewers generally feel positive about the paper (and sometimes disagree with #F3hr).
- Given above, I'd recommend acceptance and ask authors to include the discussions into paper revision.
Decision: Accept (poster)