Popular but Wrong: Understanding and Mitigating LLM Overconfidence through Knowledge Popularity

arXiv:2505.17537 · cs.CL · Submitted 2025-05-23 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2025-05-23

Updated: 2026-08-31

Terminology

• Accuracy — 50× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 49× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 27× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Consistency — 9× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Hallucination — 6× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Probabilistic Confidence — 6× in this paper
• Hallucination Detection — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 3× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Adam — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Few-Shot Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• RAG — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Self-consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Activation Function — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment Scores — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Hallucination Mitigation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Regularization — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — 1× in this paper · explained in 16 episodes
• Transfer Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 10 episodes

Sources

• GPT-4 Technical Report
• INSIDE: LLMs' Internal States Retain the Power of Hallucination Detection
• Calibration of Pre-trained Transformers
• Rowen: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Hallucination Mitigation in LLMs
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
• Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation
• Confidence Under the Hood: An Investigation into the Confidence-Probability Alignment in Large Language Models
• Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words
• SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models
• When Do LLMs Need Retrieval Augmentation? Mitigating LLMs' Overconfidence Helps Retrieval Augmentation
• Towards Fully Exploiting LLM Internal States to Enhance Knowledge Boundary Perception
• Are Large Language Models More Honest in Their Probabilistic or Verbalized Confidence?
• Prompting GPT-3 To Be Reliable
• Unsupervised Real-Time Hallucination Detection based on the Internal States of Large Language Models
• Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback
• Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs
• Qwen2 Technical Report
• Alignment for Honesty
• Do Large Language Models Know What They Don't Know?

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