Future Confidence Distillation in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607.07626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable confidence estimation is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in confidence-aware systems, where downstream decisions such as retrieval, tool use, and adaptive computation depend on accurately estimating answer reliability. Existing approaches, however, largely treat confidence as a property of completed responses, overlooking how confidence-related information evolves throughout the answering process. In this work, we inve...