The study investigates sycophancy in Chinese large language models (LLMs) by analyzing 364,941 responses from DeepSeek, Qwen, and Doubao to 12,165 yes/no factual questions derived from real-world search queries. It examines how user beliefs, reasoning, and anti-sycophancy prompts affect the distribution of correct, incorrect, and uncertain answers, finding that anti-sycophancy instructions can reduce belief-aligned errors but often increase uncertainty. The results show that preventing agreement with false beliefs does not necessarily preserve factual accuracy, underscoring the need for transition-level evaluation in Chinese-language factual QA.
By Geng Liu, Feng Li, Mengxiao Zhu, Francesco Pierri
The paper evaluates how modern large language models use internal web search to answer factual questions. Using 783 static queries and 288 dynamic queries, the authors find that enabling retrieval improves accuracy on static questions but hurts confidence calibration. On dynamic queries, models often retrieve but still achieve less than 70% accuracy, mainly due to poor query formulation and source selection, indicating that internal web search works better as a quick verification tool than a full information‑retrieval system.
By Sahil Kale
The study measures Google AI Overviews (AIOs), noting they activate for 13.7% of queries overall and 64.7% of question-form queries, with lower rates for politically sensitive topics. AIOs cite more credible domains than typical search results, yet 30% of cited pages are not shown in the first-page results, indicating a distinct source selection process. Among 98,020 atomic claims, 11.0% lack support from cited pages, mainly due to omissions, and over half of cited pages contain display ads, reducing publisher revenue while Google’s ads remain.
By Haofei Xu, Umar Iqbal, Jacob M. Montgomery
The paper introduces RAG‑Stress, a diagnostic protocol that tests how retrieval‑augmented generation models handle misleading evidence. By fixing the question and reference answer, editing a single assertion to support an incorrect answer, and varying source‑priority policies and evidence positions, the study measures misleading rate (MR) and clean accuracy across fifteen systems on multiple QA datasets. Results show that prioritizing documents increases MR by 10.9–13.5 percentage points, with the highest MR when the misleading span appears at the end of the evidence.
By Shunyuan Zhou, Hao Chen, Tianyu Wang, Goose Lin, Zaiyuan Wang, Haiying Zhao
ReliableRAG is a new framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation that tackles misinformation in multi‑hop question answering. It extracts structured triples from retrieved documents, evaluates each triple’s reliability by combining semantic relevance to the query with credibility, and keeps only the top‑K reliable, non‑redundant triples. Using these refined triples, the system builds robust reasoning chains that filter out deceptive misinformation and produce accurate, trustworthy answers.
By Jinpu Jiang, Xuan Wu, Wenhao Song, Bo Yang, You Zhou, Hongwei Ge, Heow Pueh Lee, Yanchun Liang, Chunguo Wu
WildSEEK is a new dataset of 3,000 real user information‑seeking queries, manually annotated for risk‑sensitive domains and whether the query is factoid or analytical. The accompanying evaluation framework tests LLM responses against four failure criteria—sycophantic behavior, overreliance, a default US‑centric perspective, and poor handling of vulnerable populations—finding higher failure rates for analytical queries. The authors also train classifiers on WildSEEK to analyze over 1.8 million realistic queries, revealing that more than a third are high‑risk and often analytical.
By Tanise Ceron, Joachim Baumann, Elisa Bassignana, Berat Cabuk, Dirk Hovy, Debora Nozza
arXiv:2507. 02983v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for transforming digital health by enabling automated medical question answering.
By Mohammad Anas Azeez, Rafiq Ali, Ebad Shabbir, Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Jiechao Gao, Usman Naseem
Large language models have made natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDB) newly credible, but LLM text-to-SQL systems fail in a way that matters for deployment: a hallucinated column or a mis-a...
arXiv:2609.00319v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Online health information seeking is shifting from keyword search, where users consider a ranked list of links, to conversational systems that compos...
By Phuong Anh Nguyen, Jill Noorily, Matthew Flathers, Haruka Notsu, Laura Ospina-Pinillos, Tommy Nguyen, Samantha Clark, Aoife Keane, Grace Thompson, John Torous
SearchAtlas is a framework that transforms raw search trajectories of large language model (LLM) agents into structured evidential query graphs, where edges capture how evidence is propagated from queries to the final answer. The automated parsing pipeline achieves a mean edge F1 of 86.0% against human-annotated graphs and remains consistent across repeated runs. Using SearchAtlas, the authors analyze five search agents on three benchmarks, uncovering systematic differences in search scale and evidence aggregation, and revealing process failures such as fragmented answer support, unmet question constraints, and unverified parametric knowledge that correlate strongly with incorrect answers.
By Jiacheng Sang, Mengyuan Li, Sanxing Chen, Yukun Huang, Yu Feng, Bhuwan Dhingra
arXiv:2609.08094v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in public-sector settings, where incorrect guidance can cause irreversible harm. We introduce CIVI, the...
By Dingying Liu, Yunshun Zhong, Wentao Zhang, Yiyuan Li
arXiv:2511. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating fluent utterances but can lack reliable grounding in verified information.
By Shaghayegh Kolli, Richard Rosenbaum, Timo Cavelius, Lasse Strothe, Andrii Lata, Jana Diesner