The paper investigates whether language models can learn to abstain from answering when uncertain, focusing on Qwen3-14B for factual questions. Two approaches are examined: training the model itself and training a separate answer selector. The learned selector improves utility over the model’s calibrated confidence filter on TriviaQA, raising coverage from 20.2% to 30.9% and reducing error rate from 23.0% to 14.5%, though gains are inconsistent across datasets and reinforcement‑learning changes do not consistently help.
arXiv:2610.35142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often produce plausible but incorrect answers, motivating reinforcement learning methods that reward correct answers, pena...
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.
arXiv:2610.16318v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can reduce hallucination by abstaining from questions they would likely get wrong. Abstention can be implemented outsi...
Recent advances in equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with search tools and outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved new state-of-the-art results on open-domain QA tasks. However, we argue that current training paradigms harbor a critical vulnerability: they predominantly reward correct answers but fail to penalize fabricated ones when retrieval fails, thereby implicitly exacerbating hallucinations.
arXiv:2607. 10738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with search tools and outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved new state-of-the-art results on open-domain QA tasks.
arXiv:2604. 03904v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident but incorrect answers, in part because standard evaluation incentives reward guessing over expressing uncertainty.
ConfRAG introduces a confidence-guided approach to reduce hallucinations in large language models and selectively trigger Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) only when the model is uncertain. The ConfQA fine‑tuning strategy trains the model to answer correctly or respond with "I am unsure," achieving a drop in hallucination rates from 20‑40% to below 5% across factuality benchmarks. Building on ConfQA, ConfRAG limits external retrievals by more than 30% while maintaining over 95% accuracy in ideal scenarios.
arXiv:2511.11500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern language models fail a fundamental requirement of trustworthy intelligence: knowing when not to answer. Despite achieving impressive accurac...
arXiv:2607. 20090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented large language models frequently face contexts that interleave useful evidence with misleading statements or instruction-like content.
Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation. We investigate whether verbalized confidence from black-box language models can serve as an actionable signal for retrieval routing.
arXiv:2606. 29090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard way to ground large language models in external knowledge, yet most systems retrieve a fixed number of passages for every question regardless of its difficulty.
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.