Related papers: Epistemic Observability in Language Models

The ability to acknowledge the inevitable uncertainty in their knowledge and reasoning is a prerequisite for AI systems to be truly truthful and reliable. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of uncertainty specific to vision-language AI…

Confidence-weighted routing, selective abstention, and ensemble weighting all assume that a model's stated confidence is informative about its capability on the question being asked. They presume functional metacognition, the capacity to…

As language models (LMs) become integral to fields like healthcare, law, and journalism, their ability to differentiate between fact, belief, and knowledge is essential for reliable decision-making. Failure to grasp these distinctions can…

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…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable progress in complex problem-solving tasks. Despite this success, LRMs typically suffer from high computational costs during deployment, highlighting a need for efficient inference. A…

This study investigates the reliability and validity of five advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), Claude 3.5, DeepSeek v2, Gemini 2.5, GPT-4, and Mistral 24B, for automated essay scoring in a real world higher education context. A total…

Uncertainty quantification is essential for assessing the reliability and trustworthiness of modern AI systems. Among existing approaches, verbalized uncertainty, where models express their confidence through natural language, has emerged…

Modern large language model (LLM) inference engines optimize throughput and latency under fixed decoding rules, treating generation as a linear progression in token time. We propose a fundamentally different paradigm: entropic\-time…

The $\textit{LLM-as-a-judge}$ paradigm has become the operational backbone of automated AI evaluation pipelines, yet rests on an unverified assumption: that judges evaluate text strictly on its semantic content, impervious to surrounding…

Per-token billing is now the standard pricing model for commercial large language models (LLMs), so the honesty of reported token counts directly affects what users pay. We show that this kind of billing is hard to audit by design:…

Reasoning VLMs can become more accurate while progressively losing visual grounding as they think. This creates task-conditional danger zones where low-entropy predictions are confident but ungrounded, a failure mode text-only monitoring…

Prior research demonstrates that performance of language models on reasoning tasks can be influenced by suggestions, hints and endorsements. However, the influence of endorsement source credibility remains underexplored. We investigate…

Large language models (LLMs) generate not only reasoning text, but also token-level confidence trajectories that record how uncertainty evolves during inference. Whether these trajectories are relevant to reasoning correctness remains…

Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK) aims to find patterns in a capable neural network's activations that robustly track the true state of the world, especially in hard-to-verify cases where the model's output is untrusted. To further ELK…

Advances in unsupervised probes such as Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS), which reveal latent beliefs without relying on token outputs, raise the question of whether these methods can reliably assess model alignment. We investigate this by…

Linear probes can detect when language models produce outputs they "know" are wrong, a capability relevant to both deception and reward hacking. However, single-layer probes are fragile: the best layer varies across models and tasks, and…

Recent work on chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness reports single aggregate numbers (e.g., DeepSeek-R1 acknowledges hints 39% of the time), implying that faithfulness is an objective, measurable property of a model. This paper provides…

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) has emerged as a promising approach for detecting hallucinations and low-quality output of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, obtaining proper uncertainty scores is complicated by the conditional…

Large language models (LLMs) can explain their predictions through post-hoc or Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations. But an LLM could make up reasonably sounding explanations that are unfaithful to its underlying reasoning. Recent work has…

Understanding the extent to which Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generations align with a large language model's (LLM) internal computations is critical for deciding whether to trust an LLM's output. As a proxy for CoT faithfulness, Lanham et al.…