Shared Experience, Separate Learning: Companion Confidence Calibration for LLMs

Abstract

Reliable self-assessment is essential for large language models (LLMs), yet they often remain highly confident when their answers are wrong. We study \emph{concurrent confidence calibration}, where confidence is learned alongside capability improvement rather than calibrated only after training. Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) provides a natural setting for this paradigm, as it continuously produces responses paired with verifiable correctness feedback. Existing concurrent methods, however, learn both capability and confidence through reinforcement learning within shared policy parameters, potentially coupling two fundamentally different learning problems. We instead propose \emph{shared experience but separate learning}: capability and confidence learn from the same trajectories, but through separate optimization mechanisms and parameters. Based on this principle, we introduce \textbf{CoCal (Companion Confidence Calibration)}, which trains a lightweight companion from rollout hidden states and verifier-derived correctness supervision while leaving task optimization unchanged. Experiments on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B show that CoCal improves confidence estimation without sacrificing task performance, outperforming both RL-based concurrent methods and matched post-hoc calibration. The learned companion further generalizes across domains and policy shifts, while the benefits of CoCal persist at both scales.