Self-Aware Knowledge Probing: Evaluating Language Models' Relational Knowledge through Confidence Calibration

Abstract: Knowledge probing quantifies how much relational knowledge a LLM (LM) has acquired during pre-training. Existing knowledge probes evaluate model capabilities through metrics like prediction accuracy and precision. Such evaluations fail to account for the model's reliability, reflected in the calibration of its confidence scores. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration probing framework for relational knowledge, covering three modalities of model confidence: (1) intrinsic confidence, (2) structural consistency and (3) semantic grounding. Our extensive analysis of ten causal and six masked LLMs reveals that most models, especially those pre-trained with the masking objective, are overconfident. The best-calibrated scores come from confidence estimates that account for inconsistencies due to statement rephrasing. Moreover, even the largest pre-trained models fail to encode the semantics of linguistic confidence expressions accurately.