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Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes report the strategies they actually use to solve tasks, yet at other times seem unable to recognize those strategies that govern their behavior. This suggests a limited degree of metacognition -…
Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…
In order to be deployed safely, Large Language Models (LLMs) must be capable of dynamically adapting their behavior based on their level of knowledge and uncertainty associated with specific topics. This adaptive behavior, which we refer to…
Can large language models (LLMs) admit their mistakes when they should know better? In this work, we study when and why LLMs choose to retract, i.e., spontaneously and immediately acknowledge their errors. Using model-specific testbeds, we…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit behaviors suggesting awareness of their evaluation context, often adapting their reasoning strategies in benchmark settings. Prior work has shown that such evaluation awareness can distort…
Mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their reliable deployment. Existing methods typically fine-tune LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge scope. However, these methods often…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strikingly conflicting behaviors: they can appear steadfastly overconfident in their initial answers whilst at the same time being prone to excessive doubt when challenged. To investigate this apparent…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce surprisingly sophisticated estimates of their own uncertainty. However, it remains unclear to what extent this expressed confidence is tied to the reasoning, knowledge, or decision making of the…
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…
Can large language models detect and report their own internal states? A number of studies have argued that the answer to this question is yes. We argue, based on lessons from human metacognition research, that this conclusion may be…
While large language models (LLMs) improve performance by explicit reasoning, their responses are often overconfident, even though they include linguistic expressions demonstrating uncertainty. In this work, we identify what linguistic…
Large language models (LLMs) rarely admit uncertainty, often producing fluent but misleading answers, rather than abstaining (i.e., refusing to answer). This weakness is even evident in temporal question answering, where models frequently…
Verbal confidence -- prompting LLMs to state their confidence as a number or category -- is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from black-box models. However, how LLMs internally generate such scores remains unknown. We address…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to \textit{abstain} when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current…
Language models can be persuaded to abandon factual knowledge. This vulnerability is central to AI safety, but its internal mechanism remains poorly understood. We uncover a compact causal mechanism for persuasion-induced factual errors. A…
Large language models (LLMs) now solve multi-step problems by emitting extended chains of thought. During the process, they often re-derive the same intermediate steps across problems, inflating token usage and latency. This saturation of…
We study behavioral self-awareness -- an LLM's ability to articulate its behaviors without requiring in-context examples. We finetune LLMs on datasets that exhibit particular behaviors, such as (a) making high-risk economic decisions, and…
The possibility of LLM self-awareness and even sentience is gaining increasing public attention and has major safety and policy implications, but the science of measuring them is still in a nascent state. Here we introduce a novel…
Large Language Model interfaces are increasingly verbose, exposing intermediate reasoning traces alongside final answers. Traces are framed as transparency mechanisms, yet it is unclear how people use them to solve problems. We report a…
A critical component in the trustworthiness of LLMs is reliable uncertainty communication, yet LLMs often use assertive language when conveying false claims, leading to over-reliance and eroded trust. We present the first systematic study…