Pith Number

pith:7L2HV45W

pith:2026:7L2HV45WOYJRKKQUPMA4EJRT5A

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Confidence Estimation for LLMs in Multi-turn Interactions

Caiqi Zhang, Chengzu Li, Deqing Yang, Nigel Collier, Ruihan Yang, Tiancheng Hu, Xiaochen Zhu, Yijiang River Dong

A new logit probe called P(Sufficient) tracks how LLMs accumulate evidence across conversation turns while staying calibrated.

arxiv:2601.02179 v2 · 2026-01-05 · cs.CL

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state What is a Pith Number?

Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

a novel logit-based probe we introduce, P(Sufficient), proves comparatively more effective, robustly tracking evidence accumulation and distinguishing it from conversational filler.

C2weakest assumption

That the two key desiderata (per-turn calibration and monotonicity of confidence as information accumulates) are sufficient to evaluate and improve confidence estimation in multi-turn settings, and that the Hinter-Guesser paradigm produces datasets representative of real ambiguity resolution.

C3one line summary

The work establishes a framework for multi-turn LLM confidence estimation using per-turn calibration and monotonicity, with a new P(Sufficient) probe outperforming standard methods on controlled datasets.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-17T23:39:16.731029Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

faf47af3b67613152a147b01c22633e81da38582754f5c81d8878d874146e835

Aliases

arxiv: 2601.02179 · arxiv_version: 2601.02179v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.02179 · pith_short_12: 7L2HV45WOYJR · pith_short_16: 7L2HV45WOYJRKKQU · pith_short_8: 7L2HV45W

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/7L2HV45WOYJRKKQUPMA4EJRT5A \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: faf47af3b67613152a147b01c22633e81da38582754f5c81d8878d874146e835

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "a5595beac2306f40c8e2e041591e93a866d427e323b9755d5f91967658ed55b6",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-01-05T14:58:04Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "7a81e3c4961daf7a2b103063262a54ca25677e116d5a4dd2d0a0ed356b7001cb"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2601.02179",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}