Jinjian Jiang, Jing Peng, Rehan Deen, Yu Cao, Ziquan Liu, Muhammad Salman Haleem, David Mguni
When an object category is well represented in one domain but scarcely observed in another, adapting a diffusion model to the target can be unreliable. Yet the same source-target relationship may have been observed for other categories. We ask whether this recurring relation can be learned and reused for a new semantic task. We introduce Meta-Diff, which embeds source and target distributions in a shared low-dimensional task space, learns an affine transport map across paired training tasks, and generates from the transported source coordinate using a shared diffusion backbone. At deployment, it requires source examples and the identity of a previously learned relation, but neither target images nor target-specific optimisation. Gaussian-mixture experiments examine how transfer depends on task information retained by the encoder, relation predictability and the size of the source--target shift. On held-out CIFAR-100 validation tasks, correct-source transport achieves 13.9% lower mean sliced Wasserstein distance than wrong-source transport. In the one-target final-test comparison, it achieves 14.7% lower mean distance than target-only adaptation and 32.7% lower than full fine-tuning under validation-selected settings. These gains have clear limits: directly applying the known corruption to clean-source generations performs better on CIFAR, and requested-class identity remains weak. Office-Home shows domain alignment without reliable object identity; clinical stress tests show no resolved source-specific advantage. The results characterise when reusable task-space relations help and where their generative limitations remain.
Zhaohan Zhang, Ziquan Liu Queen Mary, University of London, Ioannis Patras
Assessing the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by confidence elicitation is a prominent approach to AI safety in high-stakes applications, such as healthcare and finance. Existing methods either require expensive computational overhead or suffer from poor calibration, making them impractical and unreliable for real-world deployment. In this work, we propose GrACE, a Generative Approach to Confidence Elicitation that enables scalable and reliable confidence elicitation for LLMs. GrACE adopts a novel mechanism in which the model expresses confidence by the similarity between the last hidden state and the embedding of a special token appended to the vocabulary, in real-time. We fine-tune the model for calibrating the confidence with targets associated with accuracy. Extensive experiments show that the confidence produced by GrACE achieves the best discriminative capacity and calibration on open-ended generation tasks without resorting to additional sampling or an auxiliary model. Moreover, we propose two confidence-based strategies for test-time scaling with GrACE, which not only improve the accuracy of the final decision but also significantly reduce the number of required samples, highlighting its potential as a practical solution for deploying LLMs with reliable, on-the-fly confidence estimation. The code is available at: https://github.com/petezone/Grace.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhaohan Zhang, Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Chao Shen Xi’an Jiaotong University, Ziquan Liu Queen Mary, University of London, Ioannis Patras
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in high-stakes domains such as finance, healthcare, and education, where reliable multi-turn interactions with users are essential. However, existing work on confidence estimation and calibration, a major approach to building trustworthy LLM systems, largely focuses on single-turn settings and overlooks the risks and potential of multi-turn conversations. In this work, we introduce the task of multi-turn calibration to reframe calibration from a static property into a dynamic challenge central to reliable multi-turn conversation, where calibrating model confidence at each turn conditioned on the conversation history is required. We first reveal the risks of this setting: using Expected Calibration Error at turn T (ECE@T), a new metric that tracks calibration dynamics over turns, we show that user feedback (e.g., persuasion) can degrade multi-turn calibration. To address this, we propose MTCal, which minimises ECE@T via a surrogate calibration target, and further leverage calibrated confidence in ConfChat, a decoding strategy that improves both factuality and consistency of the model response in multi-turn interactions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTCal achieves outstanding and consistent performance in multi-turn calibration, and ConfChat preserves and even enhances model performance in multi-turn interactions. Our results mark multi-turn calibration as one missing link for scaling LLM calibration toward safe, reliable, and real-world use. The code is available at: https://github.com/petezone/Multiturn-Calibration.
尚无 AI 解读，展示原文摘要
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表