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Large language models (LLMs) often present answers with high apparent confidence despite lacking an explicit mechanism for reasoning about certainty or truth. While existing benchmarks primarily evaluate single-turn accuracy, truthfulness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Mohammadreza Saadat , Steve Nemzer

The development of robust safety benchmarks for large language models requires open, reproducible datasets that can measure both appropriate refusal of harmful content and potential over-restriction of legitimate scientific discourse. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-12 David Noever , Forrest McKee

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to various domains, concerns regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs in safety-critical scenarios have been raised, due to their unpredictable tendency to hallucinate and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Xin Qiu , Risto Miikkulainen

Large language models (LLMs) encode parametric knowledge about world facts and have shown remarkable performance in knowledge-driven NLP tasks. However, their reliance on parametric knowledge may cause them to overlook contextual cues,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Wenxuan Zhou , Sheng Zhang , Hoifung Poon , Muhao Chen

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-12 David Campbell , Neil Kale , Udari Madhushani Sehwag , Bert Herring , Nick Price , Dan Borges , Alex Levinson , Christina Q Knight

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multi-turn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tianyi Zhou , Johanne Medina , Sanjay Chawla

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across sectors, yet their alignment with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is not well understood. This study evaluates eight leading LLMs on their ability to refuse prompts that explicitly…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-06-10 John Mavi , Diana Teodora Găitan , Sergio Coronado

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable interaction over both text and images, but their safety behavior can be driven by unimodal shortcuts instead of true joint intent understanding. We introduce CSR-Bench, a benchmark for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yuxuan Liu , Yuntian Shi , Kun Wang , Haoting Shen , Kun Yang

The ability of language models in RAG systems to selectively refuse to answer based on flawed context is critical for safety, yet remains a significant failure point. Our large-scale study reveals that even frontier models struggle in this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Aashiq Muhamed , Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro , Markus Dreyer , Virginia Smith , Mona T. Diab

People judge interactions with large language models (LLMs) as successful when outputs match what they want, not what they type. Yet LLMs are trained to predict the next token solely from text input, not underlying intent. Because written…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Nadav Kunievsky , James A. Evans

A major barrier towards the practical deployment of large language models (LLMs) is their lack of reliability. Three situations where this is particularly apparent are correctness, hallucinations when given unanswerable questions, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Christian Tomani , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Ivan Evtimov , Daniel Cremers , Mark Ibrahim

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit inconsistent behavior when answering paraphrased questions, suggesting a reliance on surface-level patterns rather than true semantic understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce RoParQ,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Minjoon Choi

Safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report binary outcomes, i.e. attack success rate (ASR), refusal rate, or harmful versus safe classification, which hide how risk changes between prompt and response. We present a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Mengya Hu , Qiong Wei , Sandeep Atluri

Long-context LLMs can infer objectives that are not stated explicitly. This capability is useful for reasoning over documents, code, retrieved evidence, and tool traces, but it also creates a safety risk: harmful intent can be distributed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yu Fu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Huanli Gong , Zhipeng Wei , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

Large Language Models (LLMs) effectiveness is usually evaluated by means of benchmarks such as MMLU, ARC-C, or HellaSwag, where questions are presented in their original wording, thus in a fixed, standardized format. However, real-world…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Riccardo Lunardi , Vincenzo Della Mea , Stefano Mizzaro , Kevin Roitero

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

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become the cornerstone of today's generative AI ecosystem, sparking intense competition among tech giants and startups. In particular, an MLLM generates a text response given a prompt consisting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-09 Zedian Shao , Hongbin Liu , Yuepeng Hu , Neil Zhenqiang Gong

LLMs increasingly exhibit over-refusal behavior, where safety mechanisms cause models to reject benign instructions that seemingly resemble harmful content. This phenomenon diminishes utility in production applications that repeatedly rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Utsav Maskey , Sumit Yadav , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

We propose WorldSense, a benchmark designed to assess the extent to which LLMs are consistently able to sustain tacit world models, by testing how they draw simple inferences from descriptions of simple arrangements of entities. Worldsense…

An interesting behavior in large language models (LLMs) is prompt sensitivity. When provided with different but semantically equivalent versions of the same prompt, models may produce very different distributions of answers. This suggests…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Kyle Cox , Jiawei Xu , Yikun Han , Rong Xu , Tianhao Li , Chi-Yang Hsu , Tianlong Chen , Walter Gerych , Ying Ding