Single-Query Black-Box Calibration Auditing via Logit Bias
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-09-04
Updated: 2026-09-04
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Evaluating the calibration of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their safe deployment as zero-shot classifiers.
Terminology
Abstract
Evaluating the calibration of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their safe deployment as zero-shot classifiers. Yet, commercial API providers increasingly hide the continuous output probabilities required by standard calibration metrics. To bypass this opacity, we demonstrate that any LLM API exposing a logit_bias parameter can be mathematically manipulated to evaluate exact probability thresholds using strictly one query per sample. Leveraging this mechanism, we introduce a novel and provably consistent estimator of the True Calibration Error for binary tasks. Our approach therefore provides an efficient framework for auditing black-box foundation models.
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