Related papers: Knowing When Not to Answer: Abstention-Aware Scien…
Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling K responses yields a belief state - responses a model deems plausible. Existing work exploits this…
Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts. While prior work has…
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…
This study addresses the critical issue of reliability for AI-assisted medical diagnosis. We focus on the selection prediction approach that allows the diagnosis system to abstain from providing the decision if it is not confident in the…
Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. This paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same…
How does the extent to which a model is open or closed impact the scientific inferences that can be drawn from research that involves it? In this paper, we analyze how restrictions on information about model construction and deployment…
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly show reasoning rationales alongside their answers, turning "reasoning" into a user-interface element. While step-by-step rationales are typically associated with model performance, how they…
We study the binary hypothesis testing problem where an adversary may potentially corrupt a fraction of the samples. The detector is, however, permitted to abstain from making a decision if (and only if) the adversary is present. We…
Large language models have become the latest trend in natural language processing, heavily featuring in the digital tools we use every day. However, their replies often reflect a narrow cultural viewpoint that overlooks the diversity of…
Large language models often struggle to recognize their knowledge limits in closed-book question answering, leading to confident hallucinations. While decomposed prompting is typically used to improve accuracy, we investigate its impact on…
Scientific knowledge discovery increasingly relies on large language models, yet many existing scholarly assistants depend on proprietary systems with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. Such reliance limits reproducibility and…
LLM cascades deploy small LLMs to answer most queries, limiting the use of large and expensive LLMs to difficult queries. This approach can significantly reduce costs without impacting performance. However, risk-sensitive domains such as…
Policy learning algorithms are widely used in areas such as personalized medicine and advertising to develop individualized treatment regimes. However, most methods force a decision even when predictions are uncertain, which is risky in…
Despite the dramatic progress in Large Language Model (LLM) development, LLMs often provide seemingly plausible but not factual information, often referred to as hallucinations. Retrieval-augmented LLMs provide a non-parametric approach to…
Large language models are a form of artificial intelligence systems whose primary knowledge consists of the statistical patterns, semantic relationships, and syntactical structures of language1. Despite their limited forms of "knowledge",…
While existing benchmarks probe the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains, they predominantly assess passive reasoning, providing models with all the information needed to reach a solution. By contrast,…
Abstaining classifiers have the option to abstain from making predictions on inputs that they are unsure about. These classifiers are becoming increasingly popular in high-stakes decision-making problems, as they can withhold uncertain…
Deployed language models must decide not only what to answer but also when not to answer. We present UniCR, a unified framework that turns heterogeneous uncertainty evidence including sequence likelihoods, self-consistency dispersion,…
Selective prediction systems can mitigate harms resulting from language model hallucinations by abstaining from answering in high-risk cases. Uncertainty quantification techniques are often employed to identify such cases, but are rarely…
Millions of users turn to AI models for their information needs. It is conceivable that a large number of user queries contain assumptions that may be factually inaccurate. Prior work notes that large language models (LLMs) often fail to…