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LLM self-explanations are often presented as a promising tool for AI oversight, yet their faithfulness to the model's true reasoning process is poorly understood. Existing faithfulness metrics have critical limitations, typically relying on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Harry Mayne , Justin Singh Kang , Dewi Gould , Kannan Ramchandran , Adam Mahdi , Noah Y. Siegel

Large language models are increasingly used as behavioral simulators, but it remains unclear when their outputs reflect human-like cognitive mechanisms rather than prompt-sensitive surface patterns. We study this question through the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ciarán Walsh , Emilio Barkett

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

We develop a principled procedure for determining when a large language model (LLM) should abstain from responding (e.g., by saying "I don't know") in a general domain, instead of resorting to possibly "hallucinating" a non-sensical or…

Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) tests are among the most used methods for evaluating large language models (LLMs). Besides checking the correctness of the selected answer, evaluations often consider the model's confidence through the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Tairan Fu , Javier Conde , Gonzalo Martínez , María Grandury , Pedro Reviriego

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…

Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling K responses yields a belief state - responses a model deems plausible. Existing work exploits this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Joris Baan , Wilker Aziz , Barbara Plank , Raquel Fernández

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce fluent but factually incorrect responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Abstention, where the model chooses not to answer and instead outputs phrases such as "I don't know", is a common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vy Nguyen , Ziqi Xu , Jeffrey Chan , Estrid He , Feng Xia , Xiuzhen Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance across diverse tasks by leveraging pre-trained (i.e., parametric) and external (i.e., contextual) knowledge. While substantial efforts have been made to enhance the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Hyuhng Joon Kim , Youna Kim , Sang-goo Lee , Taeuk Kim

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to build agents that can act autonomously to achieve goals. During this automatic process, agents need to take a series of actions, some of which might lead to severe consequences if incorrect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Cheng-Kuang Wu , Zhi Rui Tam , Chieh-Yen Lin , Yun-Nung Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable emergent capabilities, transforming the execution of functional tasks by leveraging external tools for complex problems that require specialized processing or up-to-date data. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Wenjun Li , Dexun Li , Kuicai Dong , Cong Zhang , Hao Zhang , Weiwen Liu , Yasheng Wang , Ruiming Tang , Yong Liu

Large language models (LLMs) often expose useful signals of self-monitoring: before solving a problem, they can estimate whether they are likely to succeed, and after solving it, they can judge whether their answer is likely to be correct.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Qi Cao , Yufan Wang , Peijia Qin , Shuhao Zhang , Pengtao Xie

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive potential to simulate human behavior. We identify a fundamental challenge in using them to simulate experiments: when LLM-simulated subjects are blind to the experimental design (as is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 George Gui , Olivier Toubia

Humans acquire knowledge by observing the external world, but also by introspection. Introspection gives a person privileged access to their current state of mind (e.g., thoughts and feelings) that is not accessible to external observers.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Felix J Binder , James Chua , Tomek Korbak , Henry Sleight , John Hughes , Robert Long , Ethan Perez , Miles Turpin , Owain Evans

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

Beliefs shape how people reason, communicate, and behave. Rather than existing in isolation, they exhibit a rich correlational structure--some connected through logical dependencies, others through indirect associations or social processes.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Joseph Malone , Rachith Aiyappa , Byunghwee Lee , Haewoon Kwak , Jisun An , Yong-Yeol Ahn

Large language models are increasingly used as computational tools for modeling human-like behavior. We introduce a behavioral induction framework that modifies model policies through fine-tuning on structured decision-making tasks: using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Nicola Milano , Davide Marocco

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, growing evidence suggests much of their success stems from memorized answer-reasoning patterns rather than genuine inference. In this work, we investigate a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Yang Wu , Yifan Zhang , Yiwei Wang , Yujun Cai , Yurong Wu , Yuran Wang , Ning Xu , Jian Cheng

Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Jie Yeo , Nirmalendu Prakash , Clement Neo , Roy Ka-Wei Lee , Erik Cambria , Ranjan Satapathy