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Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations -- factually incorrect outputs -- leading to a large body of work on detecting and mitigating such cases. We argue that it is important to distinguish between two types of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Adi Simhi , Jonathan Herzig , Idan Szpektor , Yonatan Belinkov

Mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their reliable deployment. Existing methods typically fine-tune LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge scope. However, these methods often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Hao An , Yang Xu

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such "hallucinations" persist even in state-of-the-art systems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Adam Tauman Kalai , Ofir Nachum , Santosh S. Vempala , Edwin Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to possess impressive capabilities, while also raising crucial concerns about the faithfulness of their responses. A primary issue arising in this context is the management of (un)answerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Aviv Slobodkin , Omer Goldman , Avi Caciularu , Ido Dagan , Shauli Ravfogel

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly relied upon to solve complex mathematical word problems. However, being susceptible to hallucination, they may generate inaccurate results when presented with unanswerable questions, raising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Asir Saadat , Tasmia Binte Sogir , Md Taukir Azam Chowdhury , Syem Aziz

Selective prediction systems can mitigate harms resulting from language model hallucinations by abstaining from answering in high-risk cases. Uncertainty quantification techniques are often employed to identify such cases, but are rarely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Edward Phillips , Fredrik K. Gustafsson , Sean Wu , Anshul Thakur , David A. Clifton

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate erroneous outputs, known as hallucinations, due to their limitations in discerning questions beyond their knowledge scope. While addressing hallucination has been a focal point in research,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Hongshen Xu , Zichen Zhu , Situo Zhang , Da Ma , Shuai Fan , Lu Chen , Kai Yu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks. However, some questions posed to LRMs are inherently unanswerable, such as math problems lacking sufficient conditions. We find that LRMs continually…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yi Liu , Xiangyu Liu , Zequn Sun , Wei Hu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been transformative across many domains. However, hallucination, i.e., confidently outputting incorrect information, remains one of the leading challenges for LLMs. This raises the question of how to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Toghrul Abbasli , Kentaroh Toyoda , Yuan Wang , Leon Witt , Muhammad Asif Ali , Yukai Miao , Dan Li , Qingsong Wei

Can large language models (LLMs) express their uncertainty in situations where they lack sufficient parametric knowledge to generate reasonable responses? This work aims to systematically investigate LLMs' behaviors in such situations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Genglin Liu , Xingyao Wang , Lifan Yuan , Yangyi Chen , Hao Peng

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce fluent but factually incorrect responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Abstention, where the model chooses not to answer and instead outputs phrases such as "I don't know", is a common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vy Nguyen , Ziqi Xu , Jeffrey Chan , Estrid He , Feng Xia , Xiuzhen Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) often generate fluent but factually incorrect outputs, known as hallucinations, which undermine their reliability in real-world applications. While uncertainty estimation has emerged as a promising strategy for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Pei-Fu Guo , Yun-Da Tsai , Shou-De Lin

Despite the many advances of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their unprecedented rapid evolution, their impact and integration into every facet of our daily lives is limited due to various reasons. One critical factor hindering their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Yakir Yehuda , Itzik Malkiel , Oren Barkan , Jonathan Weill , Royi Ronen , Noam Koenigstein

Despite the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains, they frequently exhibit overconfidence when encountering uncertain scenarios, yet existing solutions primarily rely on evasive responses (e.g., "I…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyu Liu , Jingquan Peng , xiaopeng Wu , Xubin Li , Tiezheng Ge , Bo Zheng , Yong Liu

Despite efforts to expand the knowledge of large language models (LLMs), knowledge gaps -- missing or outdated information in LLMs -- might always persist given the evolving nature of knowledge. In this work, we study approaches to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Shangbin Feng , Weijia Shi , Yike Wang , Wenxuan Ding , Vidhisha Balachandran , Yulia Tsvetkov

Large language models (LLMs) rarely admit uncertainty, often producing fluent but misleading answers, rather than abstaining (i.e., refusing to answer). This weakness is even evident in temporal question answering, where models frequently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Xinyu Zhou , Chang Jin , Carsten Eickhoff , Zhijiang Guo , Seyed Ali Bahrainian

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, they still struggle with generating factually incorrect content (i.e., hallucinations). A promising approach to mitigate this issue is enabling models to express…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Ruihan Yang , Caiqi Zhang , Zhisong Zhang , Xinting Huang , Sen Yang , Nigel Collier , Dong Yu , Deqing Yang

We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Gal Yona , Roee Aharoni , Mor Geva

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes applications, robust uncertainty estimation is essential for ensuring the safe and trustworthy deployment of LLMs. We present the most comprehensive study to date of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Linwei Tao , Yi-Fan Yeh , Minjing Dong , Tao Huang , Philip Torr , Chang Xu

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Linwei Tao , Yi-Fan Yeh , Bo Kai , Minjing Dong , Tao Huang , Tom A. Lamb , Jialin Yu , Philip H. S. Torr , Chang Xu