Confidence-Credibility Aware Weighted Ensembles of Small LLMs Outperform Large LLMs in Emotion Detection
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| author | Elgabry, Menna Hamdi, Ali |
| author_facet | Elgabry, Menna Hamdi, Ali |
| contents | This paper introduces a confidence-weighted, credibility-aware ensemble framework for text-based emotion detection, inspired by Condorcet's Jury Theorem (CJT). Unlike conventional ensembles that often rely on homogeneous architectures, our approach combines architecturally diverse small transformer-based large language models (sLLMs) - BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, DeBERTa, and ELECTRA, each fully fine-tuned for emotion classification. To preserve error diversity, we minimize parameter convergence while taking advantage of the unique biases of each model. A dual-weighted voting mechanism integrates both global credibility (validation F1 score) and local confidence (instance-level probability) to dynamically weight model contributions. Experiments on the DAIR-AI dataset demonstrate that our credibility-confidence ensemble achieves a macro F1 score of 93.5 percent, surpassing state-of-the-art benchmarks and significantly outperforming large-scale LLMs, including Falcon, Mistral, Qwen, and Phi, even after task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). With only 595M parameters in total, our small LLMs ensemble proves more parameter-efficient and robust than models up to 7B parameters, establishing that carefully designed ensembles of small, fine-tuned models can outperform much larger LLMs in specialized natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as emotion detection. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17630 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Confidence-Credibility Aware Weighted Ensembles of Small LLMs Outperform Large LLMs in Emotion Detection Elgabry, Menna Hamdi, Ali Computation and Language Machine Learning This paper introduces a confidence-weighted, credibility-aware ensemble framework for text-based emotion detection, inspired by Condorcet's Jury Theorem (CJT). Unlike conventional ensembles that often rely on homogeneous architectures, our approach combines architecturally diverse small transformer-based large language models (sLLMs) - BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, DeBERTa, and ELECTRA, each fully fine-tuned for emotion classification. To preserve error diversity, we minimize parameter convergence while taking advantage of the unique biases of each model. A dual-weighted voting mechanism integrates both global credibility (validation F1 score) and local confidence (instance-level probability) to dynamically weight model contributions. Experiments on the DAIR-AI dataset demonstrate that our credibility-confidence ensemble achieves a macro F1 score of 93.5 percent, surpassing state-of-the-art benchmarks and significantly outperforming large-scale LLMs, including Falcon, Mistral, Qwen, and Phi, even after task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). With only 595M parameters in total, our small LLMs ensemble proves more parameter-efficient and robust than models up to 7B parameters, establishing that carefully designed ensembles of small, fine-tuned models can outperform much larger LLMs in specialized natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as emotion detection. |
| title | Confidence-Credibility Aware Weighted Ensembles of Small LLMs Outperform Large LLMs in Emotion Detection |
| topic | Computation and Language Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17630 |