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When answering complex questions, large language models (LLMs) may produce answers that do not satisfy all criteria of the question. While existing self-evaluation techniques aim to detect if such answers are correct, these techniques are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Nishant Balepur , Jie Huang , Samraj Moorjani , Hari Sundaram , Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have benefited enormously from scaling, yet these gains are bounded by five fundamental limitations: (1) hallucination, (2) context compression, (3) reasoning degradation, (4) retrieval fragility, and (5)…

A reliable language model should be able to signal, prior to generation, when a query falls outside its knowledge. We investigate whether representation geometry can provide such a pre-generation signal by measuring the deviation of hidden…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Yucheng Du

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in mathematical reasoning capabilities. However, we argue that current large-scale reasoning models primarily rely on scaling up training datasets with diverse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Jiayi Kuang , Haojing Huang , Yinghui Li , Xinnian Liang , Zhikun Xu , Yangning Li , Xiaoyu Tan , Chao Qu , Meishan Zhang , Ying Shen , Philip S. Yu

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet their performance often deteriorates sharply in long-horizon tasks, exhibiting systematic breakdown beyond certain scales. Conventional explanations primarily…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hsien-Jyh Liao

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across many NLP tasks, their opaque internal mechanisms hinder trustworthiness and safe deployment. Existing surveys in explainable AI largely focus on post-hoc explanation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yutong Gao , Qinglin Meng , Yuan Zhou , Liangming Pan

Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce surprisingly sophisticated estimates of their own uncertainty. However, it remains unclear to what extent this expressed confidence is tied to the reasoning, knowledge, or decision making of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Jiawei Wang , Yanfei Zhou , Siddartha Devic , Deqing Fu

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse tasks but often struggle to accurately gauge their knowledge boundaries, leading to confident yet incorrect responses. This paper explores leveraging LLMs' internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Shiyu Ni , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo , Lulu Yu , Baolong Bi , Xueqi Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) generalize smoothly across continuous semantic spaces, yet strict logical reasoning demands the formation of discrete decision boundaries. Prevailing theories relying on linear isometric projections fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Long Zhang , Dai-jun Lin , Wei-neng Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of tasks, yet they still struggle with complex mathematical reasoning, a challenge fundamentally rooted in deep structural dependencies. To address this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Lei Zan , Keli Zhang , Ruichu Cai , Lujia Pan

There is considerable confusion about the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in planning and reasoning tasks. On one side are over-optimistic claims that LLMs can indeed do these tasks with just the right prompting or self-verification…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Subbarao Kambhampati , Karthik Valmeekam , Lin Guan , Mudit Verma , Kaya Stechly , Siddhant Bhambri , Lucas Saldyt , Anil Murthy

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from critical reasoning gaps, including a tendency to hallucinate and poor accuracy in classifying logical fallacies. This limitation stems from their default System 1 processing, which is fast and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Olivia Peiyu Wang , Tashvi Bansal , Ryan Bai , Emily M. Chui , Leilani H. Gilpin

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked debate about whether these systems exhibit human-level cognition. In this debate, little attention has been paid to a structural component of human cognition: core beliefs, truths that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Anna Sokol , Marianna B. Ganapini , Nitesh V. Chawla

Failures in large language models (LLMs) are often analyzed from a behavioral perspective, where incorrect outputs in factual question answering are commonly associated with missing knowledge. In this work, focusing on entity-based factual…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Haolang Lu , Hongrui Peng , WeiYe Fu , Guoshun Nan , Xinye Cao , Xingrui Li , Hongcan Guo , Kun Wang

Recent advances in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have led to significant performance improvements across many tasks. These gains come with a drastic increase in the models' size, potentially leading to slow and costly use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Tal Schuster , Adam Fisch , Jai Gupta , Mostafa Dehghani , Dara Bahri , Vinh Q. Tran , Yi Tay , Donald Metzler

Large language models have exhibited impressive performance across a broad range of downstream tasks in natural language processing. However, how a language model predicts the next token and generates content is not generally understandable…

A language model (LM) is a mapping from a linguistic context to an output token. However, much remains to be known about this mapping, including how its geometric properties relate to its function. We take a high-level geometric approach to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Emily Cheng , Diego Doimo , Corentin Kervadec , Iuri Macocco , Jade Yu , Alessandro Laio , Marco Baroni

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in software engineering, yet their effectiveness for binary analysis remains unexplored. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of commercial LLMs for assembly code deobfuscation.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Anton Tkachenko , Dmitrij Suskevic , Benjamin Adolphi

Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident yet incorrect answers, which can lead to risky failures in real-world applications. We study whether post-training can make a model's self-assessment explicit: when the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Junyu Guo , Shangding Gu , Ming Jin , Costas Spanos , Javad Lavaei

Understanding the internal mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging and complex endeavor. Even fundamental questions, such as how fine-tuning affects model behavior, often require extensive empirical evaluation. In…