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Auteurs principaux: Kissling, Christopher, Merdjanovska, Elena, Akbik, Alan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18901
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author Kissling, Christopher
Merdjanovska, Elena
Akbik, Alan
author_facet Kissling, Christopher
Merdjanovska, Elena
Akbik, Alan
contents Knowledge probing quantifies how much relational knowledge a language model (LM) has acquired during pre-training. Existing knowledge probes evaluate model capabilities through metrics like prediction accuracy and precision. Such evaluations fail to account for the model's reliability, reflected in the calibration of its confidence scores. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration probing framework for relational knowledge, covering three modalities of model confidence: (1) intrinsic confidence, (2) structural consistency and (3) semantic grounding. Our extensive analysis of ten causal and six masked language models reveals that most models, especially those pre-trained with the masking objective, are overconfident. The best-calibrated scores come from confidence estimates that account for inconsistencies due to statement rephrasing. Moreover, even the largest pre-trained models fail to encode the semantics of linguistic confidence expressions accurately.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18901
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Aware Knowledge Probing: Evaluating Language Models' Relational Knowledge through Confidence Calibration
Kissling, Christopher
Merdjanovska, Elena
Akbik, Alan
Computation and Language
Knowledge probing quantifies how much relational knowledge a language model (LM) has acquired during pre-training. Existing knowledge probes evaluate model capabilities through metrics like prediction accuracy and precision. Such evaluations fail to account for the model's reliability, reflected in the calibration of its confidence scores. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration probing framework for relational knowledge, covering three modalities of model confidence: (1) intrinsic confidence, (2) structural consistency and (3) semantic grounding. Our extensive analysis of ten causal and six masked language models reveals that most models, especially those pre-trained with the masking objective, are overconfident. The best-calibrated scores come from confidence estimates that account for inconsistencies due to statement rephrasing. Moreover, even the largest pre-trained models fail to encode the semantics of linguistic confidence expressions accurately.
title Self-Aware Knowledge Probing: Evaluating Language Models' Relational Knowledge through Confidence Calibration
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18901