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For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified, ill-posed, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Polina Kirichenko , Mark Ibrahim , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Samuel J. Bell

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving abilities in mathematics, as evaluated by existing benchmarks exclusively on well-defined problems. However, such evaluation setup constitutes a critical gap, since…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Youcheng Huang , Bowen Qin , Chen Huang , Duanyu Feng , Xi Yang , Wenqiang Lei

Abstention Ability (AA) is a critical aspect of Large Language Model (LLM) reliability, referring to an LLM's capability to withhold responses when uncertain or lacking a definitive answer, without compromising performance. Although…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Nishanth Madhusudhan , Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan , Vikas Yadav , Masoud Hashemi

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

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Bingbing Wen , Jihan Yao , Shangbin Feng , Chenjun Xu , Yulia Tsvetkov , Bill Howe , Lucy Lu Wang

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

Millions of users turn to AI models for their information needs. It is conceivable that a large number of user queries contain assumptions that may be factually inaccurate. Prior work notes that large language models (LLMs) often fail to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Rose Sathyanathan , Kinshuk Vasisht , Danish Pruthi

Large language models (LLMs) often respond confidently to questions even when they lack the necessary information, leading to hallucinated answers. In this work, we study the problem of (un)answerability detection, focusing on extractive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Maor Juliet Lavi , Tova Milo , Mor Geva

Although demonstrating remarkable performance on reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still tend to fabricate unreliable responses when confronted with problems that are unsolvable or beyond their capability, severely undermining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Boyang Xue , Qi Zhu , Rui Wang , Sheng Wang , Hongru Wang , Minda Hu , Fei Mi , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang , Qun Liu , Kam-Fai Wong

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning but are traditionally evaluated in static, "frozen world" settings: model responses are assumed to be instantaneous, and the context of a request is presumed to be immutable over the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Tsung-Han Wu , Mihran Miroyan , David M. Chan , Trevor Darrell , Narges Norouzi , Joseph E. Gonzalez

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed, models must effectively know when not to answer: abstain. Reasoning models, in particular, have gained attention for impressive performance on complex tasks. However, reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Abinitha Gourabathina , Inkit Padhi , Manish Nagireddy , Subhajit Chaudhury , Prasanna Sattigeri

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or unverifiable content, undermining their reliability in factual domains. This work investigates Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a training paradigm that…

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) possess strong semantic understanding, driving significant progress in data mining applications. This is further enhanced by large reasoning models (LRMs), which provide explicit multi-step reasoning traces. On…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Aobo Chen , Chenxu Zhao , Chenglin Miao , Mengdi Huai

While existing benchmarks probe the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains, they predominantly assess passive reasoning, providing models with all the information needed to reach a solution. By contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhanke Zhou , Xiao Feng , Zhaocheng Zhu , Jiangchao Yao , Sanmi Koyejo , Bo Han

Recent generations of language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Parshin Shojaee , Iman Mirzadeh , Keivan Alizadeh , Maxwell Horton , Samy Bengio , Mehrdad Farajtabar

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have succeeded remarkably in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their reasoning capabilities remain a fundamental challenge. While LLMs exhibit impressive fluency and factual recall, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Avinash Patil , Aryan Jadon

Reinforcement fine-tuning improves the reasoning ability of large language models, but it can also encourage them to answer unanswerable queries by guessing or hallucinating missing information. Existing abstention methods either train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Skylar Zhai , Jingcheng Liang , Dongyeop Kang
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