Discovery of Hidden Miscalibration Regimes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kobalczyk, Katarzyna, van der Schaar, Mihaela
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kobalczyk, Katarzyna
van der Schaar, Mihaela
author_facet Kobalczyk, Katarzyna
van der Schaar, Mihaela
contents Calibration is commonly evaluated by comparing model confidence with its empirical correctness, implicitly treating reliability as a function of the confidence score alone. However, this view can hide substantial structure: models may be systematically overconfident on some kinds of inputs and underconfident on others, causing global reliability diagnostics to obscure localised calibration failures. To address this, we formulate the problem of discovering hidden miscalibration regimes without assuming access to predefined data slices. We define the corresponding miscalibration field and propose a diagnostic framework for estimating it. Our approach learns a calibration-aware representation of the input space and estimates signed local miscalibration by kernel smoothing in the learned geometry. Across four real-world LLM benchmarks and twelve LLMs, we find that input-dependent calibration heterogeneity is prevalent. We further show that the discovered fields are actionable: they support local confidence correction and reduce calibration error in systematically miscalibrated regions where confidence-based methods such as isotonic regression and temperature scaling are less effective.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13484
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discovery of Hidden Miscalibration Regimes
Kobalczyk, Katarzyna
van der Schaar, Mihaela
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
Calibration is commonly evaluated by comparing model confidence with its empirical correctness, implicitly treating reliability as a function of the confidence score alone. However, this view can hide substantial structure: models may be systematically overconfident on some kinds of inputs and underconfident on others, causing global reliability diagnostics to obscure localised calibration failures. To address this, we formulate the problem of discovering hidden miscalibration regimes without assuming access to predefined data slices. We define the corresponding miscalibration field and propose a diagnostic framework for estimating it. Our approach learns a calibration-aware representation of the input space and estimates signed local miscalibration by kernel smoothing in the learned geometry. Across four real-world LLM benchmarks and twelve LLMs, we find that input-dependent calibration heterogeneity is prevalent. We further show that the discovered fields are actionable: they support local confidence correction and reduce calibration error in systematically miscalibrated regions where confidence-based methods such as isotonic regression and temperature scaling are less effective.
title Discovery of Hidden Miscalibration Regimes
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13484