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While Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely documented to be sensitive to minor prompt perturbations and prone to sycophantic alignment, their robustness in consequential, rule-bound decision-making remains under-explored. We uncover a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jon Chun , Katherine Elkins

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

Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce confident but incorrect answers, partly because common binary scoring conventions reward answering over honestly expressing uncertainty. We study whether prompt-only interventions --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Haotian Zong , Binze Li , Yufei Long , Sinyin Chang , Jialong Wu , Gillian K. Hadfield

Multimodal AI models are increasingly used in fields like healthcare, finance, and autonomous driving, where information is drawn from multiple sources or modalities such as images, texts, audios, videos. However, effectively managing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Grigor Bezirganyan , Sana Sellami , Laure Berti-Équille , Sébastien Fournier

In the absence of abundant reliable annotations for challenging tasks and contexts, how can we expand the frontier of LLM capabilities with potentially wrong answers? We focus on two research questions: (1) Can LLMs generate reliable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Jihan Yao , Wenxuan Ding , Shangbin Feng , Lucy Lu Wang , Yulia Tsvetkov

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) have been found to have difficulty knowing they do not possess certain knowledge and tend to provide specious answers in such cases. Retrieval Augmentation (RA) has been extensively studied to mitigate LLMs'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Shiyu Ni , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo , Xueqi Cheng

Ranked decision systems -- recommenders, ad auctions, clinical triage queues -- must decide when to intervene in ranked outputs and when to abstain. We study when confidence-based abstention monotonically improves decision quality, and when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Ronald Doku

Benchmarking modern large language models (LLMs) on complex and realistic tasks is critical to advancing their development. In this work, we evaluate the factual accuracy and citation performance of state-of-the-art LLMs on the task of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Maya Patel , Aditi Anand

Patients are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) with medical questions that are complex and difficult to articulate clearly. However, LLMs are sensitive to prompt phrasings and can be influenced by the way questions are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Hye Sun Yun , Geetika Kapoor , Michael Mackert , Ramez Kouzy , Wei Xu , Junyi Jessy Li , Byron C. Wallace

Despite the significant progress made in practical applications of aligned language models (LMs), they tend to be overconfident in output answers compared to the corresponding pre-trained LMs. In this work, we systematically evaluate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Guande He , Peng Cui , Jianfei Chen , Wenbo Hu , Jun Zhu

Offline evaluation of search systems depends on test collections. These benchmarks provide the researchers with a corpus of documents, topics and relevance judgements indicating which documents are relevant for each topic. While test…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-23 David Otero , Javier Parapar , Álvaro Barreiro

In-context learning with large language models (LLMs) excels at adapting to various tasks rapidly. However, its success hinges on carefully selecting demonstrations, which remains an obstacle in practice. Current approaches to this problem…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Shangqing Xu , Chao Zhang

In high-stakes medical applications, consistent answering across diverse question phrasings is essential for reliable diagnosis. However, we reveal that current Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) exhibit concerning fragility in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Songtao Jiang , Yuxi Chen , Sibo Song , Yan Zhang , Yeying Jin , Yang Feng , Jian Wu , Zuozhu Liu

Automated fact-checking systems verify claims against evidence to predict their veracity. In real-world scenarios, the retrieved evidence may not unambiguously support or refute the claim and yield conflicting but valid interpretations.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Max Glockner , Ieva Staliūnaitė , James Thorne , Gisela Vallejo , Andreas Vlachos , Iryna Gurevych

Accurate decision making in medical imaging requires reasoning over subtle visual differences between confusable conditions, yet most existing approaches rely on nearest neighbor retrieval that returns redundant evidence and reinforces a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Daivik Patel , Shrenik Patel

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…

This paper explores the problem of commonsense level vision-knowledge conflict in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), where visual information contradicts model's internal commonsense knowledge. To study this issue, we introduce an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xiaoyuan Liu , Wenxuan Wang , Youliang Yuan , Jen-tse Huang , Qiuzhi Liu , Pinjia He , Zhaopeng Tu

Large language models (LLMs) often need to balance their internal parametric knowledge with external information, such as user beliefs and content from retrieved documents, in real-world scenarios like RAG or chat-based systems. A model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Shuowei Li , Haoxin Li , Wenda Chu , Yi Fang

Ensuring large language model (LLM) reliability requires distinguishing objective unsolvability (inherent contradictions) from subjective capability limitations (tasks exceeding model competence). Current LLMs often conflate these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Dengyun Peng , Qiguang Chen , Bofei Liu , Jiannan Guan , Libo Qin , Zheng Yan , Jinhao Liu , Jianshu Zhang , Wanxiang Che