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Language models cannot be random. This paper introduces Entropic Deviation (ED), the normalised KL divergence between a model's token distribution and the uniform distribution, and measures it systematically across 31,200 generations…
Existing techniques for training language models can be misaligned with the truth: if we train models with imitation learning, they may reproduce errors that humans make; if we train them to generate text that humans rate highly, they may…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the capacity to reconstruct and trace learned content from their training data under specific elicitation conditions, yet this capability does not manifest in standard generation contexts. This…
This work presents a framework for assessing whether large language models (LLMs) encode more factual knowledge in their parameters than what they express in their outputs. While a few studies hint at this possibility, none has clearly…
We study the feasibility of identifying epistemic uncertainty (reflecting a lack of knowledge), as opposed to aleatoric uncertainty (reflecting entropy in the underlying distribution), in the outputs of large language models (LLMs) over…
We present a setup for training, evaluating and interpreting neural language models, that uses artificial, language-like data. The data is generated using a massive probabilistic grammar (based on state-split PCFGs), that is itself derived…
Large Language Models are known to capture real-world knowledge, allowing them to excel in many downstream tasks. Despite recent advances, these models are still prone to what are commonly known as hallucinations, causing them to emit…
While idiosyncrasies of the Chinese classifier system have been a richly studied topic among linguists (Adams and Conklin, 1973; Erbaugh, 1986; Lakoff, 1986), not much work has been done to quantify them with statistical methods. In this…
We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…
Recent NLP tasks have benefited a lot from pre-trained language models (LM) since they are able to encode knowledge of various aspects. However, current LM evaluations focus on downstream performance, hence lack to comprehensively inspect…
Large language models trained under diverse objectives and architectures have been shown to develop increasingly similar internal representations, an observation formalized as the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Whether this…
This paper investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of understanding their knowledge and uncertainty over questions. Specifically, we focus on addressing known-unknown questions, characterized by high…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities across diverse user queries, they still suffer from hallucinations, often arising from knowledge misalignment between pre-training and fine-tuning. To address this…
In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLM's response,…
We show that a GPT-3 model can learn to express uncertainty about its own answers in natural language -- without use of model logits. When given a question, the model generates both an answer and a level of confidence (e.g. "90% confidence"…
Can large language models (LLMs) express their uncertainty in situations where they lack sufficient parametric knowledge to generate reasonable responses? This work aims to systematically investigate LLMs' behaviors in such situations,…
Interpretability research now offers a variety of techniques for identifying abstract internal mechanisms in neural networks. Can such techniques be used to predict how models will behave on out-of-distribution examples? In this work, we…
Intuitively, unfamiliarity should lead to lack of confidence. In reality, current algorithms often make highly confident yet wrong predictions when faced with relevant but unfamiliar examples. A classifier we trained to recognize gender is…
Reliable Large Language Models (LLMs) should abstain when confidence is insufficient. However, prior studies often treat refusal as a generic "I don't know'', failing to distinguish input-level ambiguity (data uncertainty) from capability…