Title: Agentic Confidence Calibration
Primary area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
Keywords: Uncertainty Estimation, Confidence Calibration, AI Agent

Abstract: AI agents are rapidly advancing from passive language models to autonomous systems executing complex, multi-step tasks. Yet their overconfidence in failure remains a fundamental barrier to deployment in high-stakes settings. Existing calibration methods, built for static single-turn outputs, cannot address the unique challenges of agentic systems, such as compounding errors along trajectories, uncertainty from external tools, and opaque failure modes. To address these challenges, we introduce, for the first time, the problem of \emph{Agentic Confidence Calibration} and propose \textbf{Holistic Trajectory Calibration (\htcnospace)}, a novel diagnostic framework that extracts rich process-level features—ranging from macro dynamics to micro stability—across an agent’s entire trajectory. Powered by a simple, interpretable model, \htc consistently surpasses strong baselines in both calibration and discrimination, across eight benchmarks, multiple LLMs, and diverse agent frameworks. Beyond performance, \htc delivers three essential advances: it provides \emph{interpretability} by revealing the signals behind failure, enables \emph{transferability} by applying across domains without retraining, and achieves \emph{generalization} through a \emph{General Agent Calibrator} (\gacnospace) that {achieves the best calibration (lowest ECE)} on the out-of-domain GAIA benchmark. Together, these contributions establish a new process-centric paradigm for confidence calibration—laying the foundation for diagnosing and enhancing the reliability of AI agents.