Improving Confidence Estimation in Language Models with Linear Representations of Ambiguity

arXiv:2611.11838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language models (LMs) are increasingly deployed in downstream applications, accurately estimating their likelihood of success on a given example is critical. However, confidence estimates from LMs are poor predictors of their likelihood of success. Accurate confidence estimation is linked in part to the detection of aleatoric uncertainty; we hypothesize that LMs possess representations of at least some aspects of this uncertainty in the form of representations of the inherent ambiguity of the input. Using difference-in-means on minimal pairs of ambiguous and unambiguous sentences, we derive ambiguity representations in LM activations, and find that steering with them selectively (albeit weakly) modulates LMs' judgments of the input's ambiguity. We then propose DART, a fine-tuning method that encourages updates to lie within the span of the ambiguity directions, and penalizes changes to the LM activations outside of this subspace. DART greatly improves calibration, encodes these improvements into the model parameters, and maintains model accuracy on multiple-choice and generative QA tasks.