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Learning to Route LLMs with Confidence Tokens

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arxiv 2410.13284 v3 pith:IM7V7O23 submitted 2024-10-17 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

Learning to Route LLMs with Confidence Tokens

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG
keywords confidencellmstokensanswersdownstreamlearningrouteself-ref
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, especially in high-stakes settings, it becomes vital to know when the output of an LLM may be unreliable. Depending on whether an answer is trustworthy, a system can then choose to route the question to another expert, or otherwise fall back on a safe default behavior. In this work, we study the extent to which LLMs can reliably indicate confidence in their answers, and how this notion of confidence can translate into downstream accuracy gains. We propose Self-Reflection with Error-based Feedback (Self-REF), a lightweight training strategy to teach LLMs to express confidence in whether their answers are correct in a reliable manner. Self-REF introduces confidence tokens into the LLM, from which a confidence score can be extracted. Compared to conventional approaches such as verbalizing confidence and examining token probabilities, we demonstrate empirically that confidence tokens show significant improvements in downstream routing and rejection learning tasks.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Before Thinking, Learn to Decide: Proactive Routing for Efficient Visual Reasoning

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    PRP introduces proactive routing via Draft Rating Learning and Joint Rating Learning to route queries early between draft and target models for efficient multimodal reasoning.

  2. Inference Time Optimization with Confidence Dynamics

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Correct reasoning traces exhibit positive confidence gain while incorrect traces show declining confidence, enabling CDG-based voting that boosts performance on AIME, HMMT and BRUMO benchmarks across multiple LLM arch...

  3. Calibration-Aware Policy Optimization for Reasoning LLMs

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CAPO improves LLM calibration by up to 15% while matching or exceeding GRPO accuracy through logistic AUC loss and noise masking, enabling better abstention and scaling performance.

  4. RouterWise: Joint Resource Allocation and Routing for Latency-Aware Multi-Model LLM Serving

    cs.NI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Joint resource allocation and routing for multi-model LLM serving can produce up to 87% variation in achievable output quality across setups on the same GPU cluster.

  5. Causal Evidence that Language Models use Confidence to Drive Behavior

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Language models deploy multidimensional internal confidence representations and threshold-based policies to control abstention behavior, with causal support from activation steering experiments.

  6. A Greedy PDE Router for Blending Neural Operators and Classical Methods

    stat.ME 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    An approximate greedy router for hybrid PDE solvers that mimics optimal selection without true error access and shows faster, more stable error reduction on test equations.

  7. RouterWise: Joint Resource Allocation and Routing for Latency-Aware Multi-Model LLM Serving

    cs.NI 2026-04 conditional novelty 5.5

    Joint resource allocation and routing for multi-model LLM serving can raise quality under a latency SLO by up to 87% versus fixed-setup routing on the same GPUs.