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Related papers: Epistemic Observability in Language Models

200 papers

The increased deployment of LMs for real-world tasks involving knowledge and facts makes it important to understand model epistemology: what LMs think they know, and how their attitudes toward that knowledge are affected by language use in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Kaitlyn Zhou , Dan Jurafsky , Tatsunori Hashimoto

Large Language Models (LLMs) often display overconfidence, presenting information with unwarranted certainty in high-stakes contexts. We investigate the internal basis of this behavior via mechanistic interpretability. Using open-sourced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Hikaru Tsujimura , Arush Tagade

Reasoning language models have set state-of-the-art (SOTA) records on many challenging benchmarks, enabled by multi-step reasoning induced using reinforcement learning. However, like previous language models, reasoning models are prone to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Zhiting Mei , Christina Zhang , Tenny Yin , Justin Lidard , Ola Shorinwa , Anirudha Majumdar

Truly reliable AI requires more than simply scaling up knowledge; it demands the ability to know what it knows and when it does not. Yet recent research shows that even the best LLMs misjudge their own competence in more than one in five…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sahil Kale , Devendra Singh Dhami

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are known to more frequently generate non-faithful output in resource-constrained languages (Guerreiro et al., 2023 - arXiv:2303.16104), potentially because these typologically diverse languages are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Tsan Tsai Chan , Xin Tong , Thi Thu Uyen Hoang , Barbare Tepnadze , Wojciech Stempniak

Existing techniques for training language models can be misaligned with the truth: if we train models with imitation learning, they may reproduce errors that humans make; if we train them to generate text that humans rate highly, they may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Collin Burns , Haotian Ye , Dan Klein , Jacob Steinhardt

Machine learning models provide statistically impressive results which might be individually unreliable. To provide reliability, we propose an Epistemic Classifier (EC) that can provide justification of its belief using support from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Chitresh Bhushan , Zhaoyuan Yang , Nurali Virani , Naresh Iyer

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as automated judges in benchmarking and reward modeling, ensuring their reliability, efficiency, and robustness has become critical. In this work, we present a systematic comparison…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Pratik Jayarao , Himanshu Gupta , Neeraj Varshney , Chaitanya Dwivedi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multi-turn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tianyi Zhou , Johanne Medina , Sanjay Chawla

Data attribution methods aim to answer useful counterfactual questions like "what would a ML model's prediction be if it were trained on a different dataset?" However, estimation of data attribution models through techniques like empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Ari Karchmer , Martin Pawelczyk , Seth Neel

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains where errors carry high social, scientific, or safety costs. Yet standard confidence estimators, such as token likelihood, semantic similarity and multi-sample consistency,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Pengyue Yang , Jiawen Wen , Haolin Jin , Linghan Huang , Huaming Chen , Ling Chen

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in aligning visual and textual modalities, enabling a wide range of applications in multimodal understanding and generation. While they excel in zero-shot and transfer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Hao Dong , Moru Liu , Jian Liang , Eleni Chatzi , Olga Fink

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

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic miscalibration with rhetorical intensity not proportionate to epistemic grounding. This study tests this hypothesis and proposes a framework for quantifying this decoupling by designing a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Asim D. Bakhshi

If AI models can detect when they are being evaluated, the effectiveness of evaluations might be compromised. For example, models could have systematically different behavior during evaluations, leading to less reliable benchmarks for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Joe Needham , Giles Edkins , Govind Pimpale , Henning Bartsch , Marius Hobbhahn

Machine learning models are increasingly deployed for critical decision-making tasks, making it important to verify that they do not contain gender or racial biases picked up from training data. Typical approaches to achieve fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Giorgian Borca-Tasciuc , Xingzhi Guo , Stanley Bak , Steven Skiena

Machine Learning (ML) has become an integral part of our society, commonly used in critical domains such as finance, healthcare, and transportation. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate not only whether ML models make correct predictions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Steven Cho , Seaton Cousins-Baxter , Stefano Ruberto , Valerio Terragni

Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo , Seyedarmin Azizi , Souvik Kundu , Massoud Pedram

Large language models (LLMs) achieve higher accuracy on challenging reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute through multiple trajectory sampling. However, standard aggregation methods like majority voting or individual confidence-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yingchuan Zhang , Terry Ma , Wenxuan Zhong , Ping Ma

Estimation of a model's confidence on its outputs is critical for Conversational AI systems based on large language models (LLMs), especially for reducing hallucination and preventing over-reliance. In this work, we provide an exhaustive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Yi-Jyun Sun , Suvodip Dey , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Gokhan Tur