Intrinsic Sequence-Likelihood Confidence in Retrieval-Dominated Extractive QA: Two Pre-Specified Negatives, and What They Do and Do Not Attribute

arXiv:2609.19942 · cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-17 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-17

Updated: 2026-09-30

Comments: 26 pages main text + 26 pages supplementary (Online Resource 3). Submitted to Applied Intelligence. Code and data: doi:10.5281/zenodo.22710121, doi:10.5281/zenodo.22721044

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Accuracy — 51× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 43× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• RAG — 30× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Distillation — 27× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 25× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• AUROC — 21× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 21× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Abstention — 16× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Fine-Tuning — 14× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Benchmark — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AUC — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Hallucination — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Cosine Similarity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Degeneracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Domain Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing — 2× in this paper
• Hallucination Detection — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• International Conference on Learning Representations — 2× in this paper
• Knowledge Graph — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Self-Distillation — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems — 1× in this paper
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Deferral — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Few-Shot Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• International Conference on Computer Vision — 1× in this paper
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 11 episodes
• Knowledge graphs — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information — 1× in this paper
• LoRA Adapters — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics — 1× in this paper
• Multi-hop Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Representation Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Self-consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network
• RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data
• Dataset Distillation

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