English
Related papers

Related papers: The Truthfulness Spectrum Hypothesis

200 papers

Although language model scores are often treated as probabilities, their reliability as probability estimators has mainly been studied through calibration, overlooking other aspects. In particular, it is unclear whether language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Eitan Wagner , Yuli Slavutsky , Omri Abend

We study how to characterize and predict the truthfulness of texts generated from large language models (LLMs), which serves as a crucial step in building trust between humans and LLMs. Although several approaches based on entropy or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Fan Yin , Jayanth Srinivasa , Kai-Wei Chang

Estimating the confidence of large language model (LLM) outputs is essential for real-world applications requiring high user trust. Black-box uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods, relying solely on model API access, have gained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Quan Xiao , Debarun Bhattacharjya , Balaji Ganesan , Radu Marinescu , Katsiaryna Mirylenka , Nhan H Pham , Michael Glass , Junkyu Lee

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has notably transformed numerous sectors, offering impressive text generation capabilities. Yet, the reliability and truthfulness of these models remain pressing concerns. To this end, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Satyapriya Krishna , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently prioritize conflicting in-context information over pre-existing parametric memory, a phenomenon often termed sycophancy or compliance. However, the mechanistic realization of this behavior remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Long Zhang , Fangwei Lin

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Diego Calanzone , Stefano Teso , Antonio Vergari

Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) frequently generate hallucinations. Previous work shows that their internal states encode rich signals of truthfulness, yet the origins and mechanisms of these signals…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Wen Luo , Guangyue Peng , Wei Li , Shaohang Wei , Feifan Song , Liang Wang , Nan Yang , Xingxing Zhang , Jing Jin , Furu Wei , Houfeng Wang

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) can comply with harmful instructions, raising serious safety concerns despite their impressive capabilities. Recent work has leveraged probing-based approaches to study the separability of malicious and benign…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Cheng Wang , Zeming Wei , Qin Liu , Muhao Chen

The propensity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations and non-factual content undermines their reliability in high-stakes domains, where rigorous control over Type I errors (the conditional probability of incorrectly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Fan Nie , Xiaotian Hou , Shuhang Lin , James Zou , Huaxiu Yao , Linjun Zhang

We explore uncertainty quantification in large language models (LLMs), with the goal to identify when uncertainty in responses given a query is large. We simultaneously consider both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, where the former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Yasin Abbasi Yadkori , Ilja Kuzborskij , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

The application of large language models (LLMs) in healthcare holds significant promise for enhancing clinical decision-making, medical research, and patient care. However, their integration into real-world clinical settings raises critical…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Manar Aljohani , Jun Hou , Sindhura Kommu , Xuan Wang

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

To deploy large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes application domains that require substantively accurate responses to open-ended prompts, we need reliable, computationally inexpensive methods that assess the trustworthiness of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Dhrupad Bhardwaj , Julia Kempe , Tim G. J. Rudner

We study the feasibility of identifying epistemic uncertainty (reflecting a lack of knowledge), as opposed to aleatoric uncertainty (reflecting entropy in the underlying distribution), in the outputs of large language models (LLMs) over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Gustaf Ahdritz , Tian Qin , Nikhil Vyas , Boaz Barak , Benjamin L. Edelman

Large language models (LLMs) are notorious for hallucinating, i.e., producing erroneous claims in their output. Such hallucinations can be dangerous, as occasional factual inaccuracies in the generated text might be obscured by the rest of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in natural language processing, but their underlying mechanisms are often misunderstood. Despite exhibiting coherent answers and apparent reasoning behaviors, LLMs rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Bo Zhou , Daniel Geißler , Paul Lukowicz

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Shiyu Ni , Keping Bi , Lulu Yu , Jiafeng Guo

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear whether these behaviors arise from a single mechanism or multiple distinct processes. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Daniel Vennemeyer , Phan Anh Duong , Tiffany Zhan , Tianyu Jiang

While existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) measure deception rates, the underlying conditions that give rise to deceptive behavior are poorly understood. We investigate this question using a novel dataset of realistic moral…