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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in information-seeking and decision-making tasks. Despite their broad utility, LLMs tend to generate information that conflicts with real-world facts, and their persuasive style can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Arslan Chaudhry , Sridhar Thiagarajan , Dilan Gorur

To predict what someone will say is to model how they think. We study this through next-turn dialogue prediction: given a conversation, predict the next utterance produced by a person. We compare learning approaches along two dimensions:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Kanishk Gandhi , Agam Bhatia , Noah D. Goodman

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Diego Calanzone , Stefano Teso , Antonio Vergari

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled them to communicate their confidence in natural language, improving transparency and reliability. However, this expressiveness is often accompanied by systematic overconfidence,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Ki Jung Seo , Sehun Lim , Taeuk Kim

The handling of probabilities in the form of uncertainty or partial information is an essential task for LLMs in many settings and applications. A common approach to evaluate an LLM's probabilistic reasoning capabilities is to assess its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Manuel Mondal , Ljiljana Dolamic , Gérôme Bovet , Philippe Cudré-Mauroux , Julien Audiffren

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents that interact with users and with the world. To do so successfully, LLMs must construct representations of the world and form probabilistic beliefs about them. To provide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Linlu Qiu , Fei Sha , Kelsey Allen , Yoon Kim , Tal Linzen , Sjoerd van Steenkiste

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used as simulacra for people, yet their ability to match the distribution of views of a specific demographic group and be \textit{distributionally aligned} remains uncertain. This notion of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Nicole Meister , Carlos Guestrin , Tatsunori Hashimoto

Can LLMs accurately adjust their confidence when facing opposition? Building on previous studies measuring calibration on static fact-based question-answering tasks, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in a dynamic, adversarial debate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Pradyumna Shyama Prasad , Minh Nhat Nguyen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in mathematical reasoning tasks when guided by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, they tend to produce highly confident yet incorrect outputs, which poses significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhenjiang Mao , Artem Bisliouk , Rohith Reddy Nama , Ivan Ruchkin

Human users increasingly communicate with large language models (LLMs), but LLMs suffer from frequent overconfidence in their output, even when its accuracy is questionable, which undermines their trustworthiness and perceived legitimacy.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Dennis Ulmer , Alexandra Lorson , Ivan Titov , Christian Hardmeier

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used to evaluate natural language generation tasks as automated metrics. However, the likelihood, a measure of LLM's plausibility for a sentence, can vary due to superficial differences in sentences,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Masanari Oi , Masahiro Kaneko , Ryuto Koike , Mengsay Loem , Naoaki Okazaki

Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as alternatives to human experts for estimating unknown quantities with associated uncertainty, a process known as Bayesian elicitation. We test this by asking eleven LLMs to estimate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Luka Hobor , Mario Brcic , Mihael Kovac , Kristijan Poje

To maintain user trust, large language models (LLMs) should signal low confidence on examples where they are incorrect, instead of misleading the user. The standard approach of estimating confidence is to use the softmax probabilities of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Vaishnavi Shrivastava , Percy Liang , Ananya Kumar

Language models (LMs) should provide reliable confidence estimates to help users detect mistakes in their outputs and defer to human experts when necessary. Asking a language model to assess its confidence ("Score your confidence from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Vaishnavi Shrivastava , Ananya Kumar , Percy Liang

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating plausible explanations of how they arrived at an answer to a question. However, these explanations can misrepresent the model's "reasoning" process, i.e., they can be unfaithful. This,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Katie Matton , Robert Osazuwa Ness , John Guttag , Emre Kıcıman

Typically, when evaluating Theory of Mind, we consider the beliefs of others to be binary: held or not held. But what if someone is unsure about their own beliefs? How can we quantify this uncertainty? We propose a new suite of tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Anthony Sicilia , Malihe Alikhani

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing every aspect of society. They are increasingly used in problem-solving tasks to substitute human assessment and reasoning. LLMs are trained on what humans write and are thus exposed to human…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Fengfei Sun , Ningke Li , Kailong Wang , Lorenz Goette

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance in various tasks, one of their most prominent drawbacks is generating inaccurate or false information with a confident tone. In this paper, we provide evidence that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Amos Azaria , Tom Mitchell

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content that is as persuasive as human-written text and appear capable of selectively producing deceptive outputs. These capabilities raise concerns about potential misuse and unintended…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Cameron R. Jones , Benjamin K. Bergen