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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, especially in high-stakes settings, it becomes vital to know when the output of an LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Yu-Neng Chuang , Prathusha Kameswara Sarma , Parikshit Gopalan , John Boccio , Sara Bolouki , Xia Hu , Helen Zhou

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fuxiang Zhang , Jiacheng Xu , Chaojie Wang , Ce Cui , Yang Liu , Bo An

Mechanistic approaches to deception in large language models (LLMs) often rely on "lie detectors", that is, truth probes trained to identify internal representations of model outputs as false. The lie detector approach to LLM deception…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Tom-Felix Berger

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on factoid question answering, they are still prone to hallucination and untruthful responses, particularly when tasks demand information outside their parametric…

Previous works on Large Language Models (LLMs) have mainly focused on evaluating their helpfulness or harmlessness. However, honesty, another crucial alignment criterion, has received relatively less attention. Dishonest behaviors in LLMs,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Steffi Chern , Zhulin Hu , Yuqing Yang , Ethan Chern , Yuan Guo , Jiahe Jin , Binjie Wang , Pengfei Liu

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) underscores the urgent need to ensure their fairness. However, LLMs frequently present dominant viewpoints while ignoring alternative perspectives from minority parties, resulting in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Tianlin Li , Xiaoyu Zhang , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Qian Liu , Qing Guo , Chao Shen , Yang Liu

Recent research on large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to understand and employ deceptive behavior, even without explicit prompting. However, such behavior has only been observed in rare, specialized cases and has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Laurène Vaugrante , Francesca Carlon , Maluna Menke , Thilo Hagendorff

Integrating free-text explanations to in-context learning of large language models (LLM) is shown to elicit strong reasoning capabilities along with reasonable explanations. In this paper, we consider the problem of leveraging the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Shiyang Li , Jianshu Chen , Yelong Shen , Zhiyu Chen , Xinlu Zhang , Zekun Li , Hong Wang , Jing Qian , Baolin Peng , Yi Mao , Wenhu Chen , Xifeng Yan

Recent research has made significant strides in aligning large language models (LLMs) with helpfulness and harmlessness. In this paper, we argue for the importance of alignment for \emph{honesty}, ensuring that LLMs proactively refuse to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuqing Yang , Ethan Chern , Xipeng Qiu , Graham Neubig , Pengfei Liu

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

Previous work has shown that training "helpful-only" LLMs with reinforcement learning on a curriculum of gameable environments can lead models to generalize to egregious specification gaming, such as editing their own reward function or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Leo McKee-Reid , Christoph Sträter , Maria Angelica Martinez , Joe Needham , Mikita Balesni

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…

As large language models (LLMs) advance, concerns about their misconduct in complex social contexts intensify. Existing research overlooked the systematic understanding and assessment of their criminal capability in realistic interactions.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Xinyi Wu , Geng Hong , Pei Chen , Yueyue Chen , Xudong Pan , Min Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, recent literature reveals that LLMs generate nonfactual responses intermittently, which impedes the LLMs' reliability for further…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Yukun Zhao , Lingyong Yan , Weiwei Sun , Guoliang Xing , Chong Meng , Shuaiqiang Wang , Zhicong Cheng , Zhaochun Ren , Dawei Yin

Large Language Models (LLMs) are able to improve their responses when instructed to do so, a capability known as self-correction. When instructions provide only the task's goal without specific details about potential issues in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Guangliang Liu , Haitao Mao , Bochuan Cao , Zhiyu Xue , Xitong Zhang , Rongrong Wang , Jiliang Tang , Kristen Johnson

We explore a method for improving the performance of large language models through self-reflection and reinforcement learning. By incentivizing the model to generate better self-reflections when it answers incorrectly, we demonstrate that a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Shelly Bensal , Umar Jamil , Christopher Bryant , Melisa Russak , Kiran Kamble , Dmytro Mozolevskyi , Muayad Ali , Waseem AlShikh

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, it is difficult to know whether the models are reasoning based on deep understandings of truth and logic, or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Boshi Wang , Xiang Yue , Huan Sun

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated robust capabilities across various natural language tasks. However, producing outputs that are consistently honest and helpful remains an open challenge. To overcome this challenge, this paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Duc Hieu Ho , Chenglin Fan

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Guangyu Shen , Siyuan Cheng , Xiangzhe Xu , Yuan Zhou , Hanxi Guo , Zhuo Zhang , Xiangyu Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate factually inaccurate content even if they have corresponding knowledge, which critically undermines their reliability. Existing approaches attempt to mitigate this by incorporating uncertainty in QA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xiaoning Dong , Chengyan Wu , Yajie Wen , Yu Chen , Yun Xue , Jing Zhang , Wei Xu , Bolei Ma