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Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as parametric knowledge bases, but often underperform on question answering (QA) tasks due to hallucinations and uncertainty. While prior work attributes these failures to knowledge gaps in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Xingjian Tao , Yiwei Wang , Yujun Cai , Zhicheng Yang , Jing Tang

This project develops a self correcting framework for large language models (LLMs) that detects and mitigates hallucinations during multi-step reasoning. Rather than relying solely on final answer correctness, our approach leverages fine…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Chelsea Zou , Yiheng Yao , Basant Khalil

Quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) is important for safety-critical applications because it helps spot incorrect answers, known as hallucinations. One major trend of uncertainty quantification methods is based on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lucie Kunitomo-Jacquin , Edison Marrese-Taylor , Ken Fukuda

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Bingbing Wen , Jihan Yao , Shangbin Feng , Chenjun Xu , Yulia Tsvetkov , Bill Howe , Lucy Lu Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Junyu Guo , Shangding Gu , Ming Jin , Costas Spanos , Javad Lavaei

Probabilistic decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) often yields inconsistent outputs, particularly on complex or long-form questions. Self-Consistency (SC) mitigates this for short-form QA by majority voting over exact strings, whereas…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Jungsuk Oh , Jay-Yoon Lee

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted in an increasingly wide range of applications, user-model interactions have grown in both frequency and scale. Consequently, research has focused on evaluating the robustness of LLMs, an essential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Jiahang He , Rishi Ramachandran , Neel Ramachandran , Aryan Katakam , Kevin Zhu , Sunishchal Dev , Ashwinee Panda , Aryan Shrivastava

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to build agents that can act autonomously to achieve goals. During this automatic process, agents need to take a series of actions, some of which might lead to severe consequences if incorrect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Cheng-Kuang Wu , Zhi Rui Tam , Chieh-Yen Lin , Yun-Nung Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning is crucial to aligning large language models (LLMs), but the process is notoriously unstable and exhibits high variance across model checkpoints. In practice, selecting the best checkpoint is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Manh Nguyen , Dung Nguyen , Dai Do , Svetha Venkatesh , Hung Le

Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Yukun Zhao , Lingyong Yan , Weiwei Sun , Guoliang Xing , Shuaiqiang Wang , Chong Meng , Zhicong Cheng , Zhaochun Ren , Dawei Yin

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved widespread success on a variety of in-context few-shot tasks, but this success is typically evaluated via correctness rather than consistency. We argue that self-consistency is an important…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Angelica Chen , Jason Phang , Alicia Parrish , Vishakh Padmakumar , Chen Zhao , Samuel R. Bowman , Kyunghyun Cho

Modern language models fail a fundamental requirement of trustworthy intelligence: knowing when not to answer. Despite achieving impressive accuracy on benchmarks, these models produce confident hallucinations, even when wrong answers carry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mohamad Amin Mohamadi , Tianhao Wang , Zhiyuan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful linguistic engines but remain susceptible to hallucinations: plausible-sounding outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported. In this work, we present a mathematically grounded framework to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Moses Kiprono

Understanding why a large language model (LLM) is uncertain about the response is important for their reliable deployment. Current approaches, which either provide a single uncertainty score or rely on the classical aleatoric-epistemic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Aditya Taparia , Ransalu Senanayake , Kowshik Thopalli , Vivek Narayanaswamy

The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically allows models to refine and improve their answers, yet systematic analysis of the multi-turn behavior of LLMs remains limited. In this paper, we propose the FlipFlop…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Philippe Laban , Lidiya Murakhovs'ka , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

In safety-critical applications, language models should be able to characterize their uncertainty with meaningful probabilities. Many uncertainty quantification approaches require supervised data; however, finding suitable unseen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sophia Hager , Simon Zeng , Nicholas Andrews

Machine learning has advanced dramatically, narrowing the accuracy gap to humans in multimodal tasks like visual question answering (VQA). However, while humans can say "I don't know" when they are uncertain (i.e., abstain from answering a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Spencer Whitehead , Suzanne Petryk , Vedaad Shakib , Joseph Gonzalez , Trevor Darrell , Anna Rohrbach , Marcus Rohrbach

Despite efforts to expand the knowledge of large language models (LLMs), knowledge gaps -- missing or outdated information in LLMs -- might always persist given the evolving nature of knowledge. In this work, we study approaches to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Shangbin Feng , Weijia Shi , Yike Wang , Wenxuan Ding , Vidhisha Balachandran , Yulia Tsvetkov

Effective abstention (EA), recognizing evidence insufficiency and refraining from answering, is critical for reliable multimodal systems. Yet existing evaluation paradigms for vision-language models (VLMs) and multi-agent systems (MAS)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Nishanth Madhusudhan , Vikas Yadav , Alexandre Lacoste

LLM cascades deploy small LLMs to answer most queries, limiting the use of large and expensive LLMs to difficult queries. This approach can significantly reduce costs without impacting performance. However, risk-sensitive domains such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Michael J. Zellinger , Rex Liu , Matt Thomson