Each Insufficient in Its Own Way: Calibrating Language Models Across Varying Evidence States

Overview & Synopsis

How can a language model know whether it has enough evidence to answer? Language models tend to answer even when the evidence they have is insufficient. Deciding whether to answer or gather more evidence requires a calibrated estimate of how likely an answer is to be correct with the available evidence. However, most calibration work treats the input as fixed, without asking how this estimate should change with the evidence. We introduce \emph{evidence-state calibration}, which requires a model's confidence before answering to match its probability of answering correctly and to change accordingly whenever the evidence changes this probability. We propose \ours{} (\textbf{Suffi}ciency \textbf{C}onfidence \textbf{E}stimation), which fine-tunes the confidence already present in a model's next-token distribution to match how often the model answers correctly from each evidence state. Across clinical diagnosis and multi-hop question answering with four models from two families, \ours{} reduces the Brier score by up to 60\% and increases AUROC by up to 0.16. Its confidence matches the empirical success rate and responds not only to the amount of evidence but also to which evidence is present, showing that models can learn to judge whether their current evidence is enough to answer.