EviRank: Evidence-Based Confidence Estimation for LLM-Based Ranking

Large Language Models show promise for recommendation, but they raise reliability concerns due to limited domain coverage and inherent stochasticity. Existing uncertainty quantification methods persist two fundamental challenges: (1) the global confidence score designed for question answering fails to reveal which positions are unreliable in ranking list; (2) fine-grained confidence extracted from model internals exhibits uniformly low values across all positions, making it impossible to filter unreliable predictions. To tackle the challenges, we propose an evidence-based confidence estimation for LLM-based ranking (EviRank). We extract three complementary evidences from a single forward pass and aggregate them via reliable opinion aggregation. Furthermore, we recognize that ranking positions are inherently unequal, and introduce a position-aware calibration. Lastly, the calibrated confidence guides ranking optimization. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both recommendation and uncertainty quantification.