Verbalized and Internal Probabilities Are Coupled in Large Language Models

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models carry an internal notion of uncertainty in their sampling distribution, i.e., the probabilities they place on generating one answer rather than another. They can also be asked to state a confidence, in words or as a number: a verbalized uncertainty. Prior work suggests that internal probabilities track relative frequencies in the training data, and that verbalized probabilities track explicit probabilistic assertions in the