Your Pre-trained LLM is Secretly an Unsupervised Confidence Calibrator

Post-training of large language models is essential for adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to align with human preferences and downstream tasks. While PLMs typically exhibit well-calibrated confidence, post-trained language models (PoLMs) often suffer from over-confidence, assigning high confidence to both correct and incorrect outputs, which can undermine reliability in critical applications. A major obstacle in calibrating PoLMs is the scarcity of labeled data for individual downstream tasks. To address this, we propose Disagreement-Aware Confidence Alignment (DACA), a novel unsupervised method to optimize the parameters (e.g., temperature τ) in post-hoc confidence calibration. Our method is motivated by the under-confidence issue caused by prediction disagreement between the PLM and PoLM while aligning their confidence via temperature scaling.