Evaluating and Calibrating LLM Confidence on Questions with Multiple Correct Answers

Confidence calibration is essential for making large language models (LLMs) reliable, yet existing training-free methods have been primarily studied under single-answer question answering. In this paper, we show that these methods break down in the presence of multiple valid answers, where disagreement among equally correct responses leads to systematic underestimation of confidence. To enable a systematic study of this phenomenon, we introduce MACE, a benchmark of 12,000 factual questions spanning six domains with varying numbers of correct answers. Experiments across 15 representative calibration methods and four LLM families (7B-72B) reveal that while accuracy increases with answer cardinality, estimated confidence consistently decreases, causing severe miscalibration for questions with mixed answer counts. To address this issue, we propose Semantic Confidence Aggregation (SCA), which aggregates confidence over multiple high-probability sampled responses. SCA achieves state-of-the-art calibration performance under mixed-answer settings while preserving strong calibration on single-answer questions.

Uncovering Selective State Space Model's Capabilities in Lifelong Sequential Recommendation

Sequential Recommenders have been widely applied in various online services, aiming to model users' dynamic interests from their sequential interactions. With users increasingly engaging with online platforms, vast amounts of lifelong user behavioral sequences have been generated. However, existing sequential recommender models often struggle to handle such lifelong sequences. The primary challenges stem from computational complexity and the ability to capture long-range dependencies within the sequence. Recently, a state space model featuring a selective mechanism (i.e., Mamba) has emerged. In this work, we investigate the performance of Mamba for lifelong sequential recommendation (i.e., length>=2k). More specifically, we leverage the Mamba block to model lifelong user sequences selectively. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of representative sequential recommendation models in the setting of lifelong sequences. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of Mamba. We found that RecMamba achieves performance comparable to the representative model while significantly reducing training duration by approximately 70% and memory costs by 80%. Codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/nancheng58/RecMamba}.