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Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly used in Question Answering (QA) settings, increasingly in the natural sciences if not science at large. Reliable Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is critical for the trustworthy uptake of generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Philip Müller , Nicholas Popovič , Michael Färber , Peter Steinbach

Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-18 Oliver L. Pescott , Robin J. Boyd , Gary D. Powney , Gavin B. Stewart

Large language models demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities through chain-of-thought prompting, but whether this reasoning quality transfers across languages remains underexplored. We introduce a human-validated framework to evaluate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Anaelia Ovalle , Candace Ross , Sebastian Ruder , Adina Williams , Karen Ullrich , Mark Ibrahim , Levent Sagun

Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Youchao Zhou , Heyan Huang , Yicheng Liu , Rui Dai , Xinglin Wang , Xingchen Zhang , Shumin Shi , Yang Deng

Determining whether a provided context contains sufficient information to answer a question is a critical challenge for building reliable question-answering systems. While simple prompting strategies have shown success on factual questions,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Akriti Jain , Aparna Garimella

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

Time series are critical for decision-making in fields like finance and healthcare. Their importance has driven a recent influx of works passing time series into language models, leading to non-trivial forecasting on some datasets. But it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Mike A. Merrill , Mingtian Tan , Vinayak Gupta , Tom Hartvigsen , Tim Althoff

Recent advances in audio-aware large language models have shown strong performance on audio question answering. However, existing benchmarks mainly cover answerable questions and overlook the challenge of unanswerable ones, where no…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-12 Chun-Yi Kuan , Hung-yi Lee

Explanations of neural models aim to reveal a model's decision-making process for its predictions. However, recent work shows that current methods giving explanations such as saliency maps or counterfactuals can be misleading, as they are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Pepa Atanasova , Oana-Maria Camburu , Christina Lioma , Thomas Lukasiewicz , Jakob Grue Simonsen , Isabelle Augenstein

Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Marco Valentino , André Freitas

Deductive reasoning is the process of deriving conclusions strictly from the given premises, without relying on external knowledge. We define honesty in this setting as a model's ability to respond only when the conclusion is logically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Jiarui Liu , Kaustubh Dhole , Yingheng Wang , Haoyang Wen , Sarah Zhang , Haitao Mao , Gaotang Li , Neeraj Varshney , Jingguo Liu , Xiaoman Pan

Refusal behavior in large language models (LLMs) enables them to decline responding to harmful, unethical, or inappropriate prompts, ensuring alignment with ethical standards. This paper investigates refusal behavior across six LLMs from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Fabian Hildebrandt , Andreas Maier , Patrick Krauss , Achim Schilling

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hen Davidov , Nachshon Cohen , Oren Kalinsky , Yaron Fairstein , Guy Kushilevitz , Ram Yazdi , Patrick Rebeschini

Acquiescence bias, i.e. the tendency of humans to agree with statements in surveys, independent of their actual beliefs, is well researched and documented. Since Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be very influenceable by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Daniel Braun

How do language models use contextual information to answer health questions? How are their responses impacted by conflicting contexts? We assess the ability of language models to reason over long, conflicting biomedical contexts using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Boya Zhang , Alban Bornet , Rui Yang , Nan Liu , Douglas Teodoro

We investigate the challenge of establishing stochastic-like guarantees when sequentially learning from a stream of i.i.d. data that includes an unknown quantity of clean-label adversarial samples. We permit the learner to abstain from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Carolin Heinzler

Multilingual LLMs often have knowledge disparities across languages, with larger gaps in under-resourced languages. Teaching LLMs to abstain in the face of knowledge gaps is thus a promising strategy to mitigate hallucinations in…

The earth system is exceedingly complex and often chaotic in nature, making prediction incredibly challenging: we cannot expect to make perfect predictions all of the time. Instead, we look for specific states of the system that lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Elizabeth A. Barnes , Randal J. Barnes

This work introduces a novel framework for evaluating LLMs' capacity to balance instruction-following with critical reasoning when presented with multiple-choice questions containing no valid answers. Through systematic evaluation across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gracjan Góral , Emilia Wiśnios , Piotr Sankowski , Paweł Budzianowski

One of the major aspects contributing to the striking performance of large language models (LLMs) is the vast amount of factual knowledge accumulated during pre-training. Yet, many LLMs suffer from self-inconsistency, which raises doubts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Anastasiia Sedova , Robert Litschko , Diego Frassinelli , Benjamin Roth , Barbara Plank