English
Related papers

Related papers: Stochastic Chameleons: Irrelevant Context Hallucin…

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong average performance yet remain unreliable at the instance level, with frequent hallucinations, brittle failures, and poorly calibrated confidence. We study reliability through the lens of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pranav Kallem

Large language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have the surprising ability to do in-context learning, where the model learns to do a downstream task simply by conditioning on a prompt consisting of input-output examples. The LM learns from these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Sang Michael Xie , Aditi Raghunathan , Percy Liang , Tengyu Ma

Shortcut learning refers to the phenomenon where models employ simple, non-robust decision rules in practical tasks, which hinders their generalization and robustness. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Rui Song , Yingji Li , Lida Shi , Fausto Giunchiglia , Hao Xu

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

Pre-training on large corpora of text enables the language models to acquire a vast amount of factual and commonsense knowledge which allows them to achieve remarkable performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. They typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Neeraj Varshney , Mihir Parmar , Nisarg Patel , Divij Handa , Sayantan Sarkar , Man Luo , Chitta Baral

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jiaoda Li , Yifan Hou , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Central to many self-improvement pipelines for large language models (LLMs) is the assumption that models can improve by reflecting on past mistakes. We study a phenomenon termed contextual drag: the presence of failed attempts in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yun Cheng , Xingyu Zhu , Haoyu Zhao , Sanjeev Arora

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

Recently proposed evaluation benchmarks aim to characterize the effective context length and the forgetting tendencies of large language models (LLMs). However, these benchmarks often rely on simplistic 'needle in a haystack' retrieval or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Raquib Bin Yousuf , Aadyant Khatri , Shengzhe Xu , Mandar Sharma , Naren Ramakrishnan

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant utility in various tasks, such as answering questions through retrieval-augmented generation. Context can be retrieved using a vectorized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ming Cheung

The utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) in analytical tasks is rooted in their vast pre-trained knowledge, which allows them to interpret ambiguous inputs and infer missing information. However, this same capability introduces a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Humam Kourani , Anton Antonov , Alessandro Berti , Wil M. P. van der Aalst

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted as the cognitive core of embodied agents. However, inherited hallucinations, which stem from failures to ground user instructions in the observed physical environment, can lead to…

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi

Large language models (LLMs) possess broad world knowledge and strong general-purpose reasoning ability, yet they struggle to learn from many in-context examples on standard machine learning (ML) tasks, that is, to leverage many-shot…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Haoyu Dong , Pengkun Zhang , Mingzhe Lu , Yanzhen Shen , Guolin Ke

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong in-context learning capabilities, but how they track and retrieve information from context remains underexplored. Drawing on the free recall paradigm in cognitive science (where participants…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Billy Dickson , Zoran Tiganj

Hallucinations -- plausible yet erroneous outputs -- remain a critical barrier to reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs). We present the first systematic study linking hallucination incidence to internal-state drift induced by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Zeyu Wei , Shuo Wang , Xiaohui Rong , Xuemin Liu , He Li

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

The hallucination problem of Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly limits their reliability and trustworthiness. Humans have a self-awareness process that allows us to recognize what we don't know when faced with queries. Inspired by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Ziwei Ji , Delong Chen , Etsuko Ishii , Samuel Cahyawijaya , Yejin Bang , Bryan Wilie , Pascale Fung

Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…