The study trains ten open‑weight large language models (LLMs) to predict their own accuracy on factual multiple‑choice questions before answering. Results show that the models’ confidence signals split into two distinct patterns: early in training, confidence aligns with output consistency (how concentrated the answer distribution is), while later, it aligns with true accuracy but only on data similar to the training set. This indicates that calibration training may not universally teach LLMs to detect their own errors.
By Nicolas Yax, Stefano Palminteri, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
arXiv:2509.24988v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Generating accurate and calibrated confidence estimates is critical for deploying LLMs in high-stakes or user-facing applications, and remain...
By Hanqi Xiao, Vaidehi Patil, Hyunji Lee, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."
By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer
The study evaluates 12 instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs on six causal‑graph benchmarks, testing five prompting strategies and four confidence sources. Findings show that LLMs tend to over‑predict edges, misclassify indirect or reversed edges as direct, and exhibit high over‑confidence, while conventional confidence estimates are unreliable and agreement signals offer limited improvement. The results suggest LLMs should be used as externally validated soft causal priors rather than definitive causal‑structure evidence.
By Amit Kumar, Elnur Adl Zarabi, Suranjana Trivedy, Zhiqian Chen, Lei Zhang, Kaiqun Fu, Taoran Ji
The paper introduces Fact-Ablated Evaluation (FAE), a framework that iteratively removes cited evidence to test whether large language models (LLMs) adjust their fact‑checking predictions accordingly. Experiments reveal that many off‑the‑shelf LLMs rely more on internal knowledge than on the provided evidence. To address this, the authors propose REAL, a training method that uses counterfactual evidence supervision to encourage LLMs to base veracity judgments on evidence, achieving better evidence‑dependent performance across four datasets.
By Xingyu Deng, Mingzi Cao, Nikolaos Aletras, Xi Wang, Mark Stevenson
arXiv:2506. 14003v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning (MU) for large language models (LLMs), commonly referred to as LLM unlearning, seeks to remove specific undesirable data or knowledge from a trained model, while maintaining its performance on standard tasks.
By Yiwei Chen, Soumyadeep Pal, Yimeng Zhang, Qing Qu, Sijia Liu
arXiv:2608. 13760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Which reasoning behaviors are associated with correct answers in reasoning models, and does reasoning-oriented training amplify those behaviors?
By Jean de Dieu Nyandwi, Leena Mathur, Yonatan Bisk, Robert Hawkins, Graham Neubig
The paper introduces VAKE, a two‑stage reinforcement‑learning framework that activates latent factual knowledge in large language models. In the Priming stage, the model explicitly inserts bridging triples into an insufficient subgraph, guided by rewards from a frozen model’s answers. The Reasoning stage then trains the model to answer from the original input, demonstrating that the elicitation capability transfers to implicit reasoning and consistently outperforms baselines across multiple benchmarks and model sizes.
By Zuocheng Ying, Yang Yang, Yumou Wu, Chuanbo Zhu, Jiarui Wang, Ziqi Wu, Jingming Cai, Junqing Yu, Zikai Song
arXiv:2607. 08046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models fine-tuned for forecasting can be accurate yet poorly calibrated, and their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may not faithfully reflect the evidence behind a forecast.
By Rapha\"el Sarfati, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari, Siddharth Boppana, Christopher J. Earls, Srikar Varadaraj, Eric Ho
arXiv:2603. 01437v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As chain of thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through verbalized reasoning.
By Kyle Cox, Darius Kianersi, Adri\`a Garriga-Alonso
arXiv:2609.38107v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Chain-of-thought traces are widely read as records of how models reach their answers, informing debugging, agent auditing, and claims about reasoning...
By Ratish Puduppully, Pranabendu Misra, Paarth Iyer, Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Subbarao Kambhampati
arXiv:2606. 06286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can reproduce training data, but existing memorization evaluations mostly measure whether models can be forced to do so, rather than whether they do so under ordinary use.
By Gianluca Barmina, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Lukas Galke Poech