Towards Universal Calibration for In-Context Classification

Abstract:In-Context Learning (ICL) has received a lot of interest recently due to its ability to improve classification accuracy for new tasks without having to fine-tune the model over these tasks. However, the impact of ICL on calibration has been far less studied. Recent work has shown that ICL can have a negative impact on calibration due to biased selection of in-context examples. The existing methods for improving ICL calibration require additional task and model-specific training, detracting from the no-fine-tuning convenience of ICL. In this work, we introduce CALIBFORMER, a universal ICL calibrator for classification tasks, that generalizes to new models and tasks without further fine-tuning on these tasks. Specifically, we design a transformer-based calibrator which uses the model predictions on in-context examples to predict a confidence score for the test input. We show that the calibrator trained on three models and ten tasks, is able to generalize/calibrate ICL predictions on several new tasks and four LLMs unseen during training. Even for frontier models like Gemini, CALIBFORMER is able to obtain over 50% reduction in calibration error.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.17096 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.17096v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.17096 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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