Can LLMs Use Linguistic Uncertainty Markers to Reliably Reflect Intrinsic Confidence?

ArXi:2605.28778v1 Announce Type: new LLMs' linguistically expressed confidence should faithfully reflect their intrinsic uncertainty. While recent work shows LLMs struggle to use epistemic markers (e.g., "it is likely. ") in a human-aligned fashion, it remains unclear whether models can apply their own linguistic confidence framework to associate markers with specific confidence levels in a stable and generalizable way, and how contextual features impact this ability.