Self-Evaluating LLMs for Multi-Step Tasks: Stepwise Confidence Estimation for Failure Detection

Vaibhav Mavi, Shubh Jaroria, Weiqi Sun

Keywords: Failure detection, Self-evaluation, confidence estimation, large language models, natural language processing

Abstract: Reliability and failure detection of large language models (LLMs) is critical for their deployment in high-stakes, multi-step reasoning tasks. Prior work explores confidence estimation for self-evaluating \textit{LLM-scorer systems}, with confidence scorers estimating the likelihood of errors in LLM responses. However, most methods focus on single-step outputs and overlook the challenges of multi-step reasoning. In this work, we extend self-evaluation techniques to multi-step tasks, testing two intuitive approaches: holistic scoring and step-by-step scoring. Using two multi-step benchmark datasets, we show that stepwise evaluation generally outperforms holistic scoring in detecting potential errors, with up to 15\% relative increase in AUC-ROC. Our findings demonstrate that self-evaluating LLM systems provide meaningful confidence estimates in complex reasoning, improving their trustworthiness and providing a practical framework for failure detection.

Submission Number: 210