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Reinforcement fine-tuning improves the reasoning ability of large language models, but it can also encourage them to answer unanswerable queries by guessing or hallucinating missing information. Existing abstention methods either train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Skylar Zhai , Jingcheng Liang , Dongyeop Kang

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on factoid question answering, they are still prone to hallucination and untruthful responses, particularly when tasks demand information outside their parametric…

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…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Daniela Fernandes , Daniel Buschek , Lev Tankelevitch , Thomas Kosch , Robin Welsch

State-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are powerful problem solvers, but they still occasionally make mistakes. However, adopting AI models in risk-sensitive domains often requires error rates near 0%. To address this gap, we propose collaboration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Michael J. Zellinger , Matt Thomson

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) extend large language models with explicit, multi-step reasoning traces to enhance transparency and performance on complex tasks. However, these reasoning traces can be redundant or logically inconsistent,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Changyue Wang , Weihang Su , Qingyao Ai , Yiqun Liu

Large language models are successful in answering factoid questions but are also prone to hallucination. We investigate the phenomenon of LLMs possessing correct answer knowledge yet still hallucinating from the perspective of inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Che Jiang , Biqing Qi , Xiangyu Hong , Dayuan Fu , Yang Cheng , Fandong Meng , Mo Yu , Bowen Zhou , Jie Zhou

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Alexandre Piché , Aristides Milios , Dzmitry Bahdanau , Chris Pal

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing and hold growing promise for advancing science, healthcare, and decision-making. Yet their training paradigms remain dominated by affirmation-based inference, akin to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Peter B. Walker , Hannah Davidson , Aiden Foster , Matthew Lienert , Thomas Pardue , Dale Russell

Despite their impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit unwanted uncertainty, a phenomenon where a model changes a previously correct answer into an incorrect one when re-prompted. This behavior undermines trust and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Tiasa Singha Roy , Ayush Rajesh Jhaveri , Ilias Triantafyllopoulos

Reasoning models are evaluated on single-turn benchmarks but deployed in multi-turn dialogue, where users push back on correct answers. Under sustained adversarial pressure we find a previously undocumented failure mode: the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yubo Li , Ramayya Krishnan , Rema Padman

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yuqing Yang , Robin Jia

Despite remarkable progress made in natural language processing, even the state-of-the-art models often make incorrect predictions. Such predictions hamper the reliability of systems and limit their widespread adoption in real-world…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Neeraj Varshney , Chitta Baral

Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Youchao Zhou , Heyan Huang , Yicheng Liu , Rui Dai , Xinglin Wang , Xingchen Zhang , Shumin Shi , Yang Deng

Large language models (LLMs) are promising tools for supporting security management tasks, such as incident response planning. However, their unreliability and tendency to hallucinate remain significant challenges. In this paper, we address…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Kim Hammar , Tansu Alpcan , Emil Lupu

Reverse thinking plays a crucial role in human reasoning. Humans can reason not only from a problem to a solution but also in reverse, i.e., start from the solution and reason towards the problem. This often enhances overall reasoning…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often falter in complex reasoning tasks due to their static, parametric knowledge, leading to hallucinations and poor performance in specialized domains like mathematics. This work explores a fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Srijan Shakya , Anamaria-Roberta Hartl , Sepp Hochreiter , Korbinian Pöppel

Despite great performance on many tasks, language models (LMs) still struggle with reasoning, sometimes providing responses that cannot possibly be true because they stem from logical incoherence. We call such responses \textit{strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Nicholas Asher , Swarnadeep Bhar

Can we trust the reasoning traces that large reasoning models (LRMs) produce? We investigate whether these traces faithfully reflect what drives model outputs, and whether models will honestly report their influence. We introduce Thought…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yijie Hao , Lingjie Chen , Ali Emami , Joyce Ho

The Retrieval-Augmented Language Model (RALM) has shown remarkable performance on knowledge-intensive tasks by incorporating external knowledge during inference, which mitigates the factual hallucinations inherited in large language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Yuan Xia , Jingbo Zhou , Zhenhui Shi , Jun Chen , Haifeng Huang

While Small Language Models (SLMs) have demonstrated promising performance on an increasingly wide array of commonsense reasoning benchmarks, current evaluation practices rely almost exclusively on the accuracy of their final answers,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Francesco Maria Molfese , Luca Moroni , Ciro Porcaro , Simone Conia , Roberto Navigli