Related papers: LLMs Know When They Know, but Do Not Act on It: A …
Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes report the strategies they actually use to solve tasks, yet at other times seem unable to recognize those strategies that govern their behavior. This suggests a limited degree of metacognition -…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit behaviors suggesting awareness of their evaluation context, often adapting their reasoning strategies in benchmark settings. Prior work has shown that such evaluation awareness can distort…
The possibility of LLM self-awareness and even sentience is gaining increasing public attention and has major safety and policy implications, but the science of measuring them is still in a nascent state. Here we introduce a novel…
Can large language models detect and report their own internal states? A number of studies have argued that the answer to this question is yes. We argue, based on lessons from human metacognition research, that this conclusion may be…
Metacognition--the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own knowledge and performance--is foundational to human decision-making, learning, and communication. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in both high-stakes…
Metacognitive knowledge refers to humans' intuitive knowledge of their own thinking and reasoning processes. Today's best LLMs clearly possess some reasoning processes. The paper gives evidence that they also have metacognitive knowledge,…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident yet incorrect answers, which can lead to risky failures in real-world applications. We study whether post-training can make a model's self-assessment explicit: when the model is…
Large language models (LLMs) commonly boost reasoning via sample-evaluate-ensemble decoders, achieving label free gains without ground truth. However, prevailing strategies score candidates using only external outputs such as token…
Large language models (LLMs) can perform reasoning computations both internally within their latent space and externally by generating explicit token sequences like chains of thought. Significant progress in enhancing reasoning abilities…
Large language models (LLMs) generate fluent and complex outputs but often fail to recognize their own mistakes and hallucinations. Existing approaches typically rely on external judges, multi-sample consistency, or text-based…
We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can predict whether they will succeed on a given task and whether their predictions improve as they progress through multi-step tasks. We also investigate whether LLMs can learn from…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mimic human cognition in various language-based tasks. However, their capacity for metacognition - particularly in predicting memory performance - remains unexplored. Here, we introduce a…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicited via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) practices. However, whether fundamental reasoning…
Large language models (LLMs) are commonly evaluated on tasks that test their knowledge or reasoning abilities. In this paper, we explore a different type of evaluation: whether an LLM can predict aspects of its own responses. Since LLMs…
Large language models (LLMs) now solve multi-step problems by emitting extended chains of thought. During the process, they often re-derive the same intermediate steps across problems, inflating token usage and latency. This saturation of…
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…
We aim to better understand the emergence of `situational awareness' in large language models (LLMs). A model is situationally aware if it's aware that it's a model and can recognize whether it's currently in testing or deployment. Today's…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as highly capable systems and are increasingly being integrated into various uses. However, the rapid pace of their deployment has outpaced a comprehensive understanding of their internal mechanisms…