Double-Calibration: Towards Reliable LLMs via Calibrating Knowledge and Reasoning Confidence

Double-Calibration: Towards Reliable LLMs via Calibrating Knowledge and Reasoning Confidence

Yuyin Lu, Ziran Liang, Yanghui Rao, Wenqi Fan, Fu Lee Wang, Qing Li

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 679-687. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/77

Reliable reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenged by their propensity for hallucination. While augmenting LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) improves factual accuracy, existing KG-augmented methods fail to quantify epistemic uncertainty in both the retrieved evidence and LLMs' reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce DoublyCal, a framework built on a novel double‑calibration principle. DoublyCal employs a lightweight proxy model to first generate KG evidence alongside a calibrated evidence confidence. This calibrated supporting evidence then guides a black-box LLM, yielding final predictions that are not only more accurate but also well-calibrated, with confidence scores traceable to the uncertainty of the supporting evidence. Experiments on knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that DoublyCal significantly improves both the accuracy and confidence calibration of black-box LLMs while maintaining low token cost.
Keywords:
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairnes: Trustworthy AI
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Applications
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Learning and reasoning
Uncertainty in AI: Applications