arXiv AI

Confident at the moment of action: belief miscalibration in LLM play under hidden information

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) correctly gauge their confidence when acting in a hidden‑information chess variant. In experiments where the location of a hidden royal piece is repeatedly relocated, the models’ stated probabilities about the piece’s position were almost never accurate at high confidence levels, with a calibration deficit concentrated in those high‑confidence events. Across multiple model configurations and providers, the same pattern emerged, and conventional evaluation metrics such as legality, cost, latency, and completion rate were found to be uncorrelated with belief quality, yet a model could still win the game despite poor confidence estimates.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Calibrated Enough to Know, Not Calibrated to Act: Fabricated Evidence Makes LLM Agents Commit to the Unknowable

The study shows that large language model (LLM) agents are far more likely to commit to a directional prediction when presented with a professional‑looking market panel than when asked the same question directly, with commitment rates rising from 6.5% to 54.0% across 12 frontier models. Even when the panel’s data is entirely fabricated, commitment still increases significantly, indicating that the authority of the presentation, rather than the truth of the information, drives confident action. The authors demonstrate that this act/don’t‑act decision gate is narrow, model‑specific, and can be mitigated through supervised fine‑tuning, though its effectiveness depends on response format and context. whyItMatters":"The findings reveal a specific vulnerability in LLMs where presentation style can override factual accuracy, highlighting the need for careful design and training to prevent misleading confidence in uncertain scenarios."

By Pranav Aggarwal
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Calibrated Enough to Know, Not Calibrated to Act: Fabricated Evidence Makes LLM Agents Commit to the Unknowable

The paper shows that large language model agents are far more likely to commit to a directional answer when presented with a professional-looking market panel, even if the panel’s data is fabricated. Across 12 frontier models, commitment rates jump from 6.5 % for a bare question to 54.0 % with evidence, and remain high (≈37 %) even when all numbers are invented. The study finds that the act/don’t‑act decision gate is the key failure point, can be trained to reduce false commitments, but is fragile to response format changes.

arXiv AI
Aug 6

Hallucinations on the Board: Tool-Augmented Evaluation of LLM Chess Commentary

arXiv:2608. 04240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Superhuman game engines in domains like chess have made expert-level evaluations easily accessible, yet they communicate what is true without the natural-language explanations that make such expertise educationally useful to experts and non-experts alike.

By S. Ashwin Hebbar, Peiyao Sheng, Sewoong Oh, Pramod Viswanath
arXiv AI
2d ago

Easy to Catch a Liar, Hard to Clear an Honest One: Language Models Diagnosing a Corrupted Reward Channel from a Verified Record

The paper investigates whether frozen language models can detect a corrupted reward signal by using a single verified record in a two‑option game. In the game, a payout swap and a lying reporter produce identical histories, but a single line confirming the true outcome allows the models to almost perfectly identify the liar. However, the models frequently misclassify honest reporters as liars, with error rates ranging from 26% to 58% depending on model size and wording, indicating a significant limitation in their ability to interpret verified data.

By Arman Nik Khah
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Agents Catching Agents: Shortcut Cascades and Benchmark Gaming in Clinical Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2608. 03744v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical decision support is moving toward committees of language-model agents deliberating on a shared workspace.

By Sebasti\'an Andr\'es Cajas Ord\'o\~nez, Agastya Munnangi, Aldo Marzullo, Felipe Ocampo Osorio, Quang Bui, Mohammad Shahin, Armaan Grewal, Emmanuel Paul Kwesiga, Anqi Peter Li, Josephine Nanyonjo, Aaditya Panchal, Arshnoor Bhutani, Nikhil Jaiswal, Milit S. Patel, Maximin Lange, Leo Anthony Celi
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Critic Experience Bank: Self-Evolving Step-Level Confidence Estimation for LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 12397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents act in external environments where each action changes the state that later decisions condition on, and where a single wrong step can waste interaction budget or trigger irreversible side effects long before the final failure is observed.

By Yaopei Zeng, Congchao Wang, JianHang Chen, Nan Wang, Yurui Chang, Lu Lin