# Graph-based Confidence Calibration for Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09664/) (2023)
- [Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14975/) (2023)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14334/) (2022)
- [CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07042/) (2018)
- [Detecting Pretraining Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16789/) (2023)
- [Generating with Confidence: Uncertainty Quantification for Black-box Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19187/) (2023)
- [Reducing conversational agents' overconfidence through linguistic calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14983/) (2020)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection and Selective Generation for Conditional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15558/) (2022)
- [LM-Polygraph: Uncertainty Estimation for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07383/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking LLMs via Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12794/) (2024)
- [Quantifying Uncertainty in Answers from any Language Model and Enhancing their Trustworthiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16175/) (2023)
- [A Confederacy of Models: a Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs on Creative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08433/) (2023)
- [WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06849/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Large Language Models Through News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08412/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13425/) (2023)
- [LUQ: Long-text Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20279/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Estimation and Quantification for LLMs: A Simple Supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15993/) (2024)
- [Factually Consistent Summarization via Reinforcement Learning with Textual Entailment Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00186/) (2023)
- [Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05973/) (2024)
- [MARS: Meaning-Aware Response Scoring for Uncertainty Estimation in Generative LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11756/) (2024)
- [How Ready are Pre-trained Abstractive Models and LLMs for Legal Case Judgement Summarization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01248/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Two Heads are Better Than One: Test-time Scaling of Multi-agent Collaborative Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09772/) (2025)
- [From Calibration to Collaboration: LLM Uncertainty Quantification Should Be More Human-Centered](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07461/) (2025)
- [Calibrating Uncertainty Quantification of Multi-Modal LLMs using Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03788/) (2025)
- [Self-Evaluating LLMs for Multi-Step Tasks: Stepwise Confidence Estimation for Failure Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07364/) (2025)
- [BrowseConf: Confidence-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23458/) (2025)
- [LLM Router: Rethinking Routing with Prefill Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20895/) (2026)
- [All Roads Lead to Rome: Graph-Based Confidence Estimation for Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12908/) (2025)
- [A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19868/) (2026)
- [Completing Missing Annotation: Multi-Agent Debate for Accurate and Scalable Relevant Assessment for IR Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06526/) (2026)
- [When Does Delegation Beat Majority? A Delegation-Based Aggregator for Multi-Sample LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08098/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable confidence estimation is essential for enhancing the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs), especially in high-stakes scenarios. Despite its importance, accurately estimating confidence in LLM responses remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose using an auxiliary learning model to assess response correctness based on the self-consistency of multiple outputs generated by the LLM. Our method builds a consistency graph to represent the agreement among multiple responses and uses a graph neural network (GNN) to estimate the likelihood that each response is correct. Experiments demonstrate that this method has strong calibration performance on various benchmark datasets and generalizes well to out-of-domain cases.