Enhancing Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs with Expectation of Aggregated Internal Belief

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of natural language tasks, but often exhibit overconfidence and generate plausible yet incorrect answers. This overconfidence, especially in models undergone Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), poses significant challenges for reliable uncertainty estimation and safe deployment. In this paper, we propose EAGLE (Expectation of AGgregated internaL bEief), a novel self-evaluation-based calibration method that leverages the internal hidden states of LLMs to derive more accurate confidence scores. Instead of relying on the model's final output, our approach extracts internal beliefs from multiple intermediate layers during self-evaluation. By aggregating these layer-wise beliefs and calculating the expectation over the resulting confidence score distribution, EAGLE produces a refined confidence score that more faithfully reflects the model's internal certainty. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that EAGLE significantly improves calibration performance over existing baselines. We also provide an in-depth analysis of EAGLE, including a layer-wise examination of uncertainty patterns, a study of the impact of self-evaluation prompts, and an analysis of the effect of self-evaluation score range.