Related papers: Are LLM Decisions Faithful to Verbal Confidence?
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted for high-stakes life advice, yet they lack standard safeguards against providing confident but misguided responses. This creates risks of sycophancy and over-confidence. This paper…
We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can predict whether they will succeed on a given task and whether their predictions improve as they progress through multi-step tasks. We also investigate whether LLMs can learn from…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit surprisingly diverse risk preferences when acting as AI decision makers, a crucial characteristic whose origins remain poorly understood despite their expanding economic roles. We analyze 50 LLMs using…
For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified, ill-posed, or…
Robust verbal confidence generated by large language models (LLMs) is crucial for the deployment of LLMs to help ensure transparency, trust, and safety in many applications, including those involving human-AI interactions. In this paper, we…
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…
Advances in the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have led to their use for information retrieval, and as components in automated decision systems. A faithful representation of probabilistic reasoning in these models may…
Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks and will even explain their reasoning, so-called self-explanations. However, convincing and wrong self-explanations can lead to unsupported confidence in LLMs, thus…
We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…
Current evaluation of large language models (LLMs) overwhelmingly prioritizes accuracy; however, in real-world and safety-critical applications, the ability to abstain when uncertain is equally vital for trustworthy deployment. We introduce…
We investigate the calibration of large language models' (LLMs') confidence across diverse tasks. The results of our preregistered study show that the current crop of LLMs are, like people, too sure they are right: confidence exceeds…
Abstention Ability (AA) is a critical aspect of Large Language Model (LLM) reliability, referring to an LLM's capability to withhold responses when uncertain or lacking a definitive answer, without compromising performance. Although…
Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…
There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it…
Large language models (LLMs) have been found to produce hallucinations when the question exceeds their internal knowledge boundaries. A reliable model should have a clear perception of its knowledge boundaries, providing correct answers…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to build agents that can act autonomously to achieve goals. During this automatic process, agents need to take a series of actions, some of which might lead to severe consequences if incorrect…
Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident but incorrect answers in settings where abstention would be safer. Standard evaluation protocols, however, require a response and do not account for how confidence should guide decisions…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic and multi-turn workflows where they are tasked to perform actions of significant consequence. In order to deploy them reliably and manage risky outcomes in these settings, it…
Large language models are increasingly relied upon as sources of information, but their propensity for generating false or misleading statements with high confidence poses risks for users and society. In this paper, we confront the critical…