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LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hen Davidov , Nachshon Cohen , Oren Kalinsky , Yaron Fairstein , Guy Kushilevitz , Ram Yazdi , Patrick Rebeschini

We aim to better understand the emergence of `situational awareness' in large language models (LLMs). A model is situationally aware if it's aware that it's a model and can recognize whether it's currently in testing or deployment. Today's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Lukas Berglund , Asa Cooper Stickland , Mikita Balesni , Max Kaufmann , Meg Tong , Tomasz Korbak , Daniel Kokotajlo , Owain Evans

We develop a principled procedure for determining when a large language model (LLM) should abstain from responding (e.g., by saying "I don't know") in a general domain, instead of resorting to possibly "hallucinating" a non-sensical or…

Effective abstention (EA), recognizing evidence insufficiency and refraining from answering, is critical for reliable multimodal systems. Yet existing evaluation paradigms for vision-language models (VLMs) and multi-agent systems (MAS)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Nishanth Madhusudhan , Vikas Yadav , Alexandre Lacoste

Large language models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on extended contexts remains inconsistent. While prior research has emphasized mid-context degradation in question answering, this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Pietro Bernardelle , Stefano Civelli , Kevin Roitero , Gianluca Demartini

Users interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) in a multi-turn conversation routinely refine their requests or pivot to new topics. LLMs, however, often miss these topic shifts and carry over irrelevant context from previous turns,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Aditya Sinha , Harald Steck , Vito Ostuni , Matteo Rinaldi

As large language models (LLMs) are applied across diverse domains, the ability to selectively unlearn specific information is becoming increasingly essential. For instance, LLMs are expected to selectively provide confidential information…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Shota Takashiro , Takeshi Kojima , Andrew Gambardella , Qi Cao , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Ambiguity in natural language poses significant challenges to Large Language Models (LLMs) used for open-domain question answering. LLMs often struggle with the inherent uncertainties of human communication, leading to misinterpretations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Aryan Keluskar , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Huan Liu

Question Answering (QA) in NLP is the task of finding answers to a query within a relevant context retrieved by a retrieval system. Yet, the mix of relevant and irrelevant information in these contexts can hinder performance enhancements in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Sangryul Kim , James Thorne

Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce confident but incorrect answers, partly because common binary scoring conventions reward answering over honestly expressing uncertainty. We study whether prompt-only interventions --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Haotian Zong , Binze Li , Yufei Long , Sinyin Chang , Jialong Wu , Gillian K. Hadfield

Although large language models (LLMs) have tremendous utility, trustworthiness is still a chief concern: models often generate incorrect information with high confidence. While contextual information can help guide generation, identifying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiarui Liu , Jivitesh Jain , Mona Diab , Nishant Subramani

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

A growing body of work has been querying LLMs with political questions to evaluate their potential biases. However, this probing method has limited stability, making comparisons between models unreliable. In this paper, we argue that LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Patrick Haller , Jannis Vamvas , Rico Sennrich , Lena A. Jäger

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit behavioral artifacts such as laziness (premature truncation of responses or partial compliance with multi-part requests), decoding suboptimality (failure to select higher-quality sequences due to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Yiqing Ma , Jung-Hua Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper…

Question Answering (QA) accounts for a significant portion of LLM usage "in the wild". However, LLMs sometimes produce false or misleading responses, also known as "hallucinations". Therefore, grounding the generated answers in contextually…

User prompts to large language models (LLMs) are often ambiguous or under-specified, and subtle contextual cues shaped by user intentions, prior knowledge, and risk factors strongly influence what constitutes an appropriate response.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Minseon Kim , Lucas Caccia , Zhengyan Shi , Matheus Pereira , Marc-Alexandre Côté , Xingdi Yuan , Alessandro Sordoni

In-context learning can improve the performances of knowledge-rich tasks such as question answering. In such scenarios, in-context examples trigger a language model (LM) to surface information stored in its parametric knowledge. We study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Yoonsang Lee , Pranav Atreya , Xi Ye , Eunsol Choi

The task of reading comprehension (RC), often implemented as context-based question answering (QA), provides a primary means to assess language models' natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities. Yet, when applied to large language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Victoria Basmov , Yoav Goldberg , Reut Tsarfaty

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