The Score Granularity Gap in Black-Box LLM Classification: A Comparative Study of Confidence Constructions

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as black-box classifiers in pipelines that automate confident decisions and route uncertain ones to human review. Such selective prediction needs a confidence score that an operator can threshold at a chosen risk level. Prior work asks whether LLM confidence is well calibrated or well ranked; we ask a complementary, deployment-oriented question that has been largely overlooked: at what resolution can the score be thresholded? We call the answer the score granularity gap. Through a controlled comparison of seven ways to build a confidence score, from a single verbalized number, to token probabilities, to querying the model many times and combining the answers, across 25 model-dataset pairs (9 LLMs, 3 benchmarks), we find that single-shot verbalized confidence, once correctly converted to a class probability, ranks cases surprisingly well, yet takes only a handful of distinct values. It therefore offers an operator only a few coarse thresholds, no matter how well it ranks. We show which constructions widen this gap, at what inference cost, and with what effect on ranking, notably that multi-query aggregation helps weak models but can degrade already-strong ones. We translate these trade-offs into concrete deployment guidance.

Learning Spatio-Temporal Dynamics for Trajectory Recovery via Time-Aware Transformer

In real-world applications, GPS trajectories often suffer from low sampling rates, with large and irregular intervals between consecutive GPS points. This sparse characteristic presents challenges for their direct use in GPS-based systems. This paper addresses the task of map-constrained trajectory recovery, aiming to enhance trajectory sampling rates of GPS trajectories. Previous studies commonly adopt a sequence-to-sequence framework, where an encoder captures the trajectory patterns and a decoder reconstructs the target trajectory. Within this framework, effectively representing the road network and extracting relevant trajectory features are crucial for overall performance. Despite advancements in these models, they fail to fully leverage the complex spatio-temporal dynamics present in both the trajectory and the road network. To overcome these limitations, we categorize the spatio-temporal dynamics of trajectory data into two distinct aspects: spatial-temporal traffic dynamics and trajectory dynamics. Furthermore, We propose TedTrajRec, a novel method for trajectory recovery. To capture spatio-temporal traffic dynamics, we introduce PD-GNN, which models periodic patterns and learns topologically aware dynamics concurrently for each road segment. For spatio-temporal trajectory dynamics, we present TedFormer, a time-aware Transformer that incorporates temporal dynamics for each GPS location by integrating closed-form neural ordinary differential equations into the attention mechanism. This allows TedFormer to effectively handle irregularly sampled data. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TedTrajRec. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ysygMhdxw/TEDTrajRec/.