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Current evaluation of large language models (LLMs) overwhelmingly prioritizes accuracy; however, in real-world and safety-critical applications, the ability to abstain when uncertain is equally vital for trustworthy deployment. We introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Sravanthi Machcha , Sushrita Yerra , Sahil Gupta , Aishwarya Sahoo , Sharmin Sultana , Hong Yu , Zonghai Yao

While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given ill-posed or ambiguous queries. We introduce statistically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yangxinyu Xie , Tao Wang , Soham Mallick , Yan Sun , Georgy Noarov , Mengxin Yu , Tanwi Mallick , Weijie J. Su , Edgar Dobriban

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 Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multi-turn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tianyi Zhou , Johanne Medina , Sanjay Chawla

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) have shown strong capabilities, enabling concise, context-aware answers in question answering (QA) tasks. The lack of transparency in complex LLMs has inspired extensive research aimed at developing methods to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yangyi Li , Mengdi Huai

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

Large language models (LLMs) that do not give consistent answers across contexts are problematic when used for tasks with expectations of consistency, e.g., question-answering, explanations, etc. Our work presents an evaluation benchmark…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Henning Bartsch , Ole Jorgensen , Domenic Rosati , Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier , Jacob Pfau

Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling K responses yields a belief state - responses a model deems plausible. Existing work exploits this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Joris Baan , Wilker Aziz , Barbara Plank , Raquel Fernández

We present an automatic large language model (LLM) conversion approach that produces uncertainty-aware LLMs capable of estimating uncertainty with every prediction. Our approach is model- and data-agnostic, is computationally-efficient, and…

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

Best-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Zhewei Kang , Xuandong Zhao , Dawn Song

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

We introduce BSDetector, a method for detecting bad and speculative answers from a pretrained Large Language Model by estimating a numeric confidence score for any output it generated. Our uncertainty quantification technique works for any…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Jiuhai Chen , Jonas Mueller

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

In recent years, large-scale language models (LLMs) have gained attention for their impressive text generation capabilities. However, these models often face the challenge of "hallucination," which undermines their reliability. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yuchen Yang , Houqiang Li , Yanfeng Wang , Yu Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to produce very high-quality tests and responses to our queries. But how much can we trust this generated text? In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty quantification in LLMs. We propose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Muhammad Mubashar , Shireen Kudukkil Manchingal , Fabio Cuzzolin

Large language models are increasingly used to answer and verify scientific claims, yet existing evaluations typically assume that a model must always produce a definitive answer. In scientific settings, however, unsupported or uncertain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Samir Abdaljalil , Erchin Serpedin , Hasan Kurban

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
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