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Many large language models (LLMs) use reasoning to generate responses but do not reveal their full reasoning traces (a.k.a. chains of thought), instead outputting only final answers and brief reasoning summaries. To demonstrate that hiding…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tingwei Zhang , John X. Morris , Vitaly Shmatikov

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified, ill-posed, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Polina Kirichenko , Mark Ibrahim , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Samuel J. Bell

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…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Xinyu Zhou , Chang Jin , Carsten Eickhoff , Zhijiang Guo , Seyed Ali Bahrainian

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks. However, some questions posed to LRMs are inherently unanswerable, such as math problems lacking sufficient conditions. We find that LRMs continually…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yi Liu , Xiangyu Liu , Zequn Sun , Wei Hu

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Hao An , Yang Xu

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Bingbing Wen , Jihan Yao , Shangbin Feng , Chenjun Xu , Yulia Tsvetkov , Bill Howe , Lucy Lu Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various reasoning tasks, yet they often struggle with problems involving missing information, exhibiting issues such as incomplete responses, factual errors, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Yuxin Liu , Chaojie Gu , Yihang Zhang , Bin Qian , Shibo He

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Sijia Chen , Baochun Li

While large language models (LLMs) are proficient at question-answering (QA), it is not always clear how (or even if) an answer follows from their latent "beliefs". This lack of interpretability is a growing impediment to widespread use of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Nora Kassner , Oyvind Tafjord , Ashish Sabharwal , Kyle Richardson , Hinrich Schuetze , Peter Clark

Abstention Ability (AA) is a critical aspect of Large Language Model (LLM) reliability, referring to an LLM's capability to withhold responses when uncertain or lacking a definitive answer, without compromising performance. Although…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Nishanth Madhusudhan , Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan , Vikas Yadav , Masoud Hashemi

A major barrier towards the practical deployment of large language models (LLMs) is their lack of reliability. Three situations where this is particularly apparent are correctness, hallucinations when given unanswerable questions, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Christian Tomani , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Ivan Evtimov , Daniel Cremers , Mark Ibrahim

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or unverifiable content, undermining their reliability in factual domains. This work investigates Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a training paradigm that…

LLM cascades deploy small LLMs to answer most queries, limiting the use of large and expensive LLMs to difficult queries. This approach can significantly reduce costs without impacting performance. However, risk-sensitive domains such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Michael J. Zellinger , Rex Liu , Matt Thomson

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained to abstain on difficult questions by answering unknown. However, we observe that LLMs often misuse this option: they output unknown even when LLMs can actually solve the questions, or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Zipeng Ling , Yuehao Tang , Shuliang Liu , Junqi Yang , Shenghong Fu , Chen Huang , Kejia Huang , Yao Wan , Zhichao Hou , Xuming Hu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, enabling them to answer a wide range of questions across various domains. However, these models are not flawless and often produce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Lang Cao

Large language models (LLMs) often improve their performance in downstream tasks when they generate Chain of Thought reasoning text before producing an answer. We investigate how LLMs recover from errors in Chain of Thought. Through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Evelyn Yee , Alice Li , Chenyu Tang , Yeon Ho Jung , Ramamohan Paturi , Leon Bergen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yuxi Sun , Aoqi Zuo , Wei Gao , Jing Ma

Despite efforts to expand the knowledge of large language models (LLMs), knowledge gaps -- missing or outdated information in LLMs -- might always persist given the evolving nature of knowledge. In this work, we study approaches to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Shangbin Feng , Weijia Shi , Yike Wang , Wenxuan Ding , Vidhisha Balachandran , Yulia Tsvetkov
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