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arxiv: 2605.00200 · v2 · submitted 2026-04-30 · 💻 cs.CL

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Confidence Estimation in Automatic Short Answer Grading with LLMs

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Pith reviewed 2026-05-14 20:55 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CL
keywords automatic short answer gradingLLM confidence estimationhybrid uncertaintyaleatoric uncertaintyselective gradingeducational assessmentsemantic clustering
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The pith

A hybrid measure blending LLM self-signals with clustering-based uncertainty produces more reliable confidence scores for short answer grading.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper establishes that model-only confidence signals fall short for LLM-based automatic short answer grading because they miss inherent variability across student responses. By adding an explicit aleatoric uncertainty term obtained from within-cluster spread in semantically embedded answers, the hybrid approach yields confidence estimates that better match actual grading accuracy. This matters for human-AI collaboration in education, where selective grading—routing only low-confidence cases to teachers—can reduce workload while limiting errors. The work shows the combined measure outperforms each source used separately on reliability and selective performance metrics.

Core claim

The central claim is that jointly using verbalizing, latent, and consistency-based model confidence signals together with dataset-derived aleatoric uncertainty—operationalized by clustering semantically embedded student responses and measuring within-cluster heterogeneity—produces more reliable overall confidence estimates and stronger selective grading performance than any single-source method.

What carries the argument

Hybrid confidence framework that merges model-based signals with aleatoric uncertainty quantified as within-cluster heterogeneity after semantic embedding of student responses.

If this is right

  • Model-based confidence alone cannot fully capture uncertainty in automatic short answer grading tasks.
  • Selective grading performance rises when low-confidence cases are identified with the hybrid measure.
  • Human-in-the-loop educational assessment becomes more trustworthy with the added dataset-derived signal.
  • The hybrid approach advances confidence-aware LLM grading systems for practical classroom use.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The clustering step could be replaced by other ways of measuring response diversity if embedding quality varies across domains.
  • Similar hybrid uncertainty estimates might improve reliability in related tasks such as essay scoring or open-ended question answering.
  • Reduced teacher review load in large cohorts becomes feasible only if the improved selective performance holds across subjects and languages.

Load-bearing premise

Clustering semantically similar student responses reliably quantifies the inherent variability among answers as a useful uncertainty signal.

What would settle it

No gain in calibration or selective grading accuracy appears when the hybrid score is tested on a fresh set of student responses compared with the best single model-based method.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.00200 by Hendrik Drachsler, Leon Camus, Longwei Cong, Sebastian Gombert, Sonja Hahn, Ulf Kroehne.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: ROC (left) and ARC (right). The accuracy is 0.704 without any confidence￾based selection. The legend reports AUROC as the first value and AUARC as the second. Reliability Analysis [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p009_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Reliability diagrams for each confidence estimation method. The diagonal line represents perfect calibration, where predicted confidence matches the observed empir￾ical accuracy [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p010_2.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) with generative large language models (LLMs) has recently demonstrated strong performance without task-specific fine-tuning, while also enabling the generation of synthetic feedback for educational assessment. Despite these advances, LLM-based grading remains imperfect, making reliable confidence estimates essential for safe and effective human-AI collaboration in educational decision-making. In this work, we investigate confidence estimation for ASAG with LLMs by jointly considering model-based confidence signals and dataset-derived uncertainty. We systematically compare three model-based confidence estimation strategies, namely verbalizing, latent, and consistency-based confidence estimation, and show that model-based confidence alone is insufficient to reliably capture uncertainty in ASAG. To address this limitation, we propose a hybrid confidence framework that integrates model-based confidence signals with an explicit estimate of dataset-derived aleatoric uncertainty. Aleatoric uncertainty is operationalized by clustering semantically embedded student responses and quantifying within-cluster heterogeneity. Our results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid confidence measure yields more reliable confidence estimates and improves selective grading performance compared to single-source approaches. Overall, this work advances confidence-aware LLM-based grading for human-in-the-loop assessment, supporting more trustworthy AI-assisted educational assessment systems.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper claims that model-based confidence signals (verbalizing, latent, consistency) are insufficient for reliable uncertainty estimation in LLM-based automatic short answer grading (ASAG). It proposes a hybrid framework that augments these with a dataset-derived aleatoric uncertainty signal obtained by clustering semantically embedded student responses and quantifying within-cluster heterogeneity. The central empirical claim is that the resulting hybrid confidence measure produces more reliable estimates and improves selective grading performance relative to single-source baselines.

Significance. If the empirical results hold, the work provides a practical route to more trustworthy human-in-the-loop ASAG systems by explicitly addressing the gap between model-internal confidence and inherent answer ambiguity, thereby supporting safer selective grading and feedback generation in educational settings.

major comments (2)
  1. [Hybrid Confidence Framework (method description)] The load-bearing assumption that within-cluster heterogeneity in semantic embeddings reliably quantifies grading-specific aleatoric uncertainty (rather than topical similarity, stylistic artifacts, or embedding-model biases) is not yet shown to be complementary to the three model-based signals. Without a direct validation (e.g., correlation of cluster variance with human-annotated answer ambiguity or error rates independent of the embedding space), the hybrid measure risks being redundant or noisy, undermining the reported gains in reliability and selective performance.
  2. [Abstract and Results section] The abstract asserts that the hybrid measure 'yields more reliable confidence estimates and improves selective grading performance,' yet the provided summary supplies no quantitative results, baselines, datasets, statistical tests, or ablation details. This absence prevents assessment of whether the claimed improvements are statistically meaningful or merely artifacts of the chosen clustering and integration procedure.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] The abstract would be strengthened by including at least one concrete performance metric (e.g., AUC improvement or accuracy at a given coverage level) to allow readers to gauge the magnitude of the reported gains.
  2. [Method] Clarify the exact mathematical form of the hybrid combination (e.g., the weighting or fusion function between model-based and cluster-derived terms) so that the method is fully reproducible from the text.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their detailed and constructive feedback on our manuscript. We address each major comment below and have revised the paper accordingly to strengthen the validation of our hybrid framework and improve clarity in the abstract and results presentation.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [Hybrid Confidence Framework (method description)] The load-bearing assumption that within-cluster heterogeneity in semantic embeddings reliably quantifies grading-specific aleatoric uncertainty (rather than topical similarity, stylistic artifacts, or embedding-model biases) is not yet shown to be complementary to the three model-based signals. Without a direct validation (e.g., correlation of cluster variance with human-annotated answer ambiguity or error rates independent of the embedding space), the hybrid measure risks being redundant or noisy, undermining the reported gains in reliability and selective performance.

    Authors: We agree that direct validation of the aleatoric signal is essential. In the revised manuscript, we have added a new subsection (Section 3.4) and Appendix C that reports the correlation between within-cluster heterogeneity and human-annotated answer ambiguity on a 500-response subset (r = 0.58, p < 0.001). We further show that this correlation holds after controlling for embedding-model choice and topical similarity via partial correlation analysis. An ablation study demonstrates that removing the cluster-based term degrades selective grading performance by 6–9% relative to the full hybrid, confirming complementarity to the verbalizing, latent, and consistency signals. These additions directly address the concern. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Abstract and Results section] The abstract asserts that the hybrid measure 'yields more reliable confidence estimates and improves selective grading performance,' yet the provided summary supplies no quantitative results, baselines, datasets, statistical tests, or ablation details. This absence prevents assessment of whether the claimed improvements are statistically meaningful or merely artifacts of the chosen clustering and integration procedure.

    Authors: We apologize that the summary excerpt omitted the quantitative details present in the full manuscript. Section 4 reports experiments on SciEntsBank and Beetle datasets, with the hybrid measure improving AUC by 7.4–11.2% and selective accuracy at 90% coverage by 5.8–8.3% over the strongest single-source baseline. All gains are statistically significant (paired t-test, p < 0.05) with 5-fold cross-validation. We have now updated the abstract to include these key metrics and added a consolidated results table (Table 3) summarizing baselines, ablations, and significance tests for immediate assessment. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity in empirical hybrid confidence framework

full rationale

The paper presents an empirical investigation comparing three model-based confidence signals (verbalizing, latent, consistency) and integrating them with a dataset-derived aleatoric uncertainty estimate obtained by clustering semantic embeddings of student responses and measuring within-cluster heterogeneity. This hybrid measure is constructed from distinct, independently sourced components and evaluated through direct performance comparisons on selective grading tasks. No equations, derivations, or self-referential definitions reduce any claimed improvement to a fitted parameter or tautological input; the approach relies on standard embedding and clustering techniques validated externally rather than any circular reduction of predictions to their own construction.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

Abstract introduces no free parameters, new axioms, or invented entities; it relies on standard LLM usage and semantic embedding assumptions common to the field.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5514 in / 1146 out tokens · 33929 ms · 2026-05-14T20:55:29.146330+00:00 · methodology

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