Extracting confidence probabilities from small local LLMs via logits

OneFanFare · reddit · 2026-09-22

Inspired by the Jev discourse, a developer built an open-source Python utility that uses a small local LLM (Gemma 4 e2b) as a classifier: it prefills context with state/question/candidates and batch-compares candidate logit probabilities in under a second. Key findings: Gemma is overconfident even in logit space (100% at normal temperature); temperature=10 yields realistic uncertainty; adding a null candidate plus calibration (per arXiv:2102.09690) produces more meaningful probabilities (e.g. 'No' at 60.6%). The approach shows promise but isn't yet directly comparable to Jev. Code: github.com/marcintkasper/universal-classifier.

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