The paper questions whether large language models (LLMs) truly introspect by critiquing recent studies that claim they can detect and report their internal states. It proposes two necessary conditions for genuine introspection: privileged access to internal representations and second‑order computation that distinguishes from first‑order task performance. Re‑examining two existing paradigms, the authors find that apparent introspective abilities can be explained by input‑based classifiers or generic anomaly detection, concluding that current evidence does not support metacognitive monitoring in LLMs.
By Shashwat Singh, Tal Linzen, Shauli Ravfogel
arXiv:2603.22161v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Metacognition -- assessing the quality of one's own cognitive performance -- guides adaptive behavior across species. Substantial research demonstr...
By Dharshan Kumaran, Nathaniel Daw, Simon Osindero, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c, Viorica Patraucean
arXiv:2607. 11881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metacognition is a foundational component of intelligence critical to effective learning, problem solving, decision-making, communication, and more.
By Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu, Areeb Gani, Jacqueline Lu, Jordan Thomas, Mark Steyvers, Arman Cohan
arXiv:2603.17839v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Verbal confidence -- prompting LLMs to state their confidence as a number or category -- is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from...
By Dharshan Kumaran, Arthur Conmy, Federico Barbero, Simon Osindero, Viorica Patraucean, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c
arXiv:2606. 32032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metacognition is a critical component of intelligence that describes the ability to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive processes.
By Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu, Avi Caciularu, Gal Yona, Idan Szpektor, Arman Cohan
Whether large language models (LLMs) can control their own internal representations matters for both machine metacognition and AI safety. A recent study applied neurofeedback to LLMs and claimed that...
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can control their own internal representations, a question relevant to machine metacognition and AI safety. Previous work claimed such control using neurofeedback, but the targets were not privileged, allowing third‑party inference from prompts. By redesigning the paradigm to enforce privileged access—mirroring human neurofeedback experiments—the authors find that LLMs fail to reliably control these internal representations, indicating that earlier claims may have relied on superficial mechanisms.
By Koshiro Aoki, Ryota Takatsuki, Gouki Minegishi, Yusuke Haruki, Daisuke Kawahara
arXiv:2608. 15400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are notorious for struggling with assessing their own uncertainty, detecting knowledge conflicts, or recognizing when problems exceed their expertise; such limitations inevitably undermine reliability and trust in LLMs.
By Charles Courchaine, Ricky J. Sethi, Hefei Qiu
arXiv:2603. 25112v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard evaluation of LLM confidence relies on calibration metrics (ECE, Brier score) that conflate how much a model knows (Type-1 accuracy) with how well its confidence signal tracks that knowledge (Type-2 metacognitive sensitivity).
By Jon-Paul Cacioli
arXiv:2408. 05568v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups.
By Florian Scholten, Tobias R. Rebholz, Mandy H\"utter
The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably detect when their own responses have been manipulated by adversarial prefill attacks. Across ten instruction‑tuned LLMs ranging from 3B to 70B parameters and four safety benchmarks, none consistently recognized compromised outputs, with models claiming intent on prefilled responses at an average of 25.3%. The research identifies that introspective signals mainly arise from safety reasoning and refusal, and that training to improve introspection can paradoxically increase attack success, underscoring the fragility of LLM self‑reporting in safety contexts.
By Quang Minh Nguyen, Uzair Ahmed, Taegyoon Kim
arXiv:2608. 12377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Brains and large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally different memory systems, but they can be compared through shared functional questions: where memory-related information is represented, how partial cues recover broader associations, how new information is written or updated, and how memory-related states can be perturbed.
By Morteza Salehjahromi, Shayan A. Zadegan, Amgad Muneer, Jia Wu