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Related papers: Confidence is Not Competence

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Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly adopted in the software engineering domain, yet the robustness of their grasp on core software design concepts remains unclear. We conduct an empirical study to systematically evaluate…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Mootez Saad , Boqi Chen , José Antonio Hernández López , Dániel Varró , Tushar Sharma

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress, but their real-world application necessitates reliable calibration. This study conducts a comprehensive analysis of calibration degradation of LLMs across four dimensions: models,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Hongseok Oh , Wonseok Hwang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been suggested for use in automated vulnerability repair, but benchmarks showing they can consistently identify security-related bugs are lacking. We thus develop SecLLMHolmes, a fully automated evaluation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Saad Ullah , Mingji Han , Saurabh Pujar , Hammond Pearce , Ayse Coskun , Gianluca Stringhini

Geometric spatial reasoning forms the foundation of many applications in artificial intelligence, yet the ability of large language models (LLMs) to operate over geometric spatial information expressed in procedural code remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Shixian Luo , Zezhou Zhu , Yu Yuan , Yuncheng Yang , Lianlei Shan , Yong Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by students, yet their tendency to provide fast and complete answers may discourage reflection and foster overconfidence. We examined how alternative LLM interaction designs support deeper…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Elena Eleftheriou , George Pallis , Marios Constantinides

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transformative not only for daily activities but also for engineering tasks. However, current evaluations of LLMs in engineering exhibit two critical shortcomings: (i) the reliance on simplified use cases,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Rene Heesch , Sebastian Eilermann , Alexander Windmann , Alexander Diedrich , Philipp Rosenthal , Oliver Niggemann

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated inherent calibration capabilities, where predicted probabilities align well with correctness, despite prior findings that deep neural networks are often overconfident. Recent studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Abhinav Joshi , Areeb Ahmad , Ashutosh Modi

The reliability of large language models (LLMs) is greatly compromised by their tendency to hallucinate, underscoring the need for precise identification of knowledge gaps within LLMs. Various methods for probing such gaps exist, ranging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Raoyuan Zhao , Abdullatif Köksal , Ali Modarressi , Michael A. Hedderich , Hinrich Schütze

Large language models are often not just wrong, but \emph{confidently wrong}: when they produce factually incorrect answers, they tend to verbalize overly high confidence rather than signal uncertainty. Such verbalized overconfidence can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Tianyi Zhao , Yinhan He , Wendy Zheng , Yujie Zhang , Chen Chen

Problem-solving has been a fundamental driver of human progress in numerous domains. With advancements in artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of tackling complex problems across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Da Zheng , Lun Du , Junwei Su , Yuchen Tian , Yuqi Zhu , Jintian Zhang , Lanning Wei , Ningyu Zhang , Huajun Chen

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

As large language models (LLMs) continue to demonstrate remarkable abilities across various domains, computer scientists are developing methods to understand their cognitive processes, particularly concerning how (and if) LLMs internally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Daniel A. Herrmann , Benjamin A. Levinstein

Despite their strengths, large language models (LLMs) often fail to communicate their confidence accurately, making it difficult to assess when they might be wrong and limiting their reliability. In this work, we demonstrate that reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Dongkeun Yoon , Seungone Kim , Sohee Yang , Sunkyoung Kim , Soyeon Kim , Yongil Kim , Eunbi Choi , Yireun Kim , Minjoon Seo

In large language model (LLM) agents, reasoning trajectories are treated as reliable internal beliefs for guiding actions and updating memory. However, coherent reasoning can still violate logical or evidential constraints, allowing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Wenhao Yuan , Chenchen Lin , Jian Chen , Jinfeng Xu , Xuehe Wang , Edith Cheuk Han Ngai

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved widespread success on a variety of in-context few-shot tasks, but this success is typically evaluated via correctness rather than consistency. We argue that self-consistency is an important…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Angelica Chen , Jason Phang , Alicia Parrish , Vishakh Padmakumar , Chen Zhao , Samuel R. Bowman , Kyunghyun Cho

Large language models (LLMs) often improve their performance in downstream tasks when they generate Chain of Thought reasoning text before producing an answer. We investigate how LLMs recover from errors in Chain of Thought. Through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Evelyn Yee , Alice Li , Chenyu Tang , Yeon Ho Jung , Ramamohan Paturi , Leon Bergen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enhances performance of large language models, but questions remain about whether these reasoning traces faithfully reflect the internal processes of the model. We present the first comprehensive study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Sriram Balasubramanian , Samyadeep Basu , Soheil Feizi

The black-box nature of Large Language Models necessitates novel evaluation frameworks that transcend surface-level performance metrics. This study investigates the internal neural representations of cognitive complexity using Bloom's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Bianca Raimondi , Maurizio Gabbrielli

Large Language Models offer impressive language capabilities but suffer from well-known limitations, including hallucinations, biases, privacy concerns, and high computational costs. These issues are largely driven by the combination of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jaime Collado-Montañez , L. Alfonso Ureña-López , Arturo Montejo-Ráez

Psychology research has shown that humans are poor at estimating their performance on tasks, tending towards underconfidence on easy tasks and overconfidence on difficult tasks. We examine three LLMs, Llama-3-70B-instruct, Claude-3-Sonnet,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Chenjun Xu , Bingbing Wen , Bin Han , Robert Wolfe , Lucy Lu Wang , Bill Howe