The paper introduces CASE, a dynamic selection combiner that uses a linear gate trained on answer-token hidden states to choose the best candidate answer from a large language model’s samples. It proposes decodability, a leakage‑free metric that predicts when hidden‑state selection will outperform majority voting, achieving a strong correlation (r=0.75) with accuracy gains. CASE improves accuracy by up to 19 points on medium‑difficulty and 16.8 points on hard questions across general and medical LLMs, and its predictive power transfers to unseen scientific domains.
arXiv:2608. 15445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a reward is correct on every training example yet consistent with more than one goal, a model can acquire an unintended one, a failure known as goal misgeneralization.
The paper studies how voting over multiple large language model (LLM) responses can be optimized under a fixed call budget. It introduces a recoverability threshold that quantifies the gap between discovering a correct answer and ensuring it wins the plurality vote, showing that the candidate set can only grow while the set of reachable winners can only shrink. The authors also present a gold‑free locking certificate that identifies the earliest prefix where all remaining continuations produce the same fixed‑budget output, and demonstrate empirical gains in accuracy and call efficiency through input permutation and exact locking.
The paper investigates token‑level certainty as a proxy for correctness in large language models. It finds that certainty better predicts whether a model will answer a question correctly than it does whether a specific response is correct, and that certainty varies by token type and position. The authors show that using certainty early in generation to allocate responses and later to weight votes improves accuracy while dramatically cutting token cost.
arXiv:2607. 10139v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the correct answer from a pool of candidate reasoning chains is the engine of test-time scaling, yet the standard selectors each carry a cost: self-consistency inherits the errors of the single model it resamples, and trained reward models need labeled data and transfer poorly off-distribution.
PROOF is a benchmark that profiles the reliability of object-level facts in instruction-tuned language models by converting a frozen Wikidata snapshot into 18,486 English multiple-choice questions grounded in 11,779 semantic facts across 101 classes, 392 properties, and 14 domains. Each question includes an explicit "I don't know" option, a "No correct option" control, and nine controlled formulations, with 1,849 questions designed as no-correct-option traps. The study evaluates 18 open-weight model deployments on 166,374 prompts, revealing wide variability in factual accuracy, sensitivity to wording changes, and the impact of decoder perturbations.
arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.
arXiv:2608. 14509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Systems that ask a language model to reach a conclusion from many sources usually concatenate them into one prompt.
arXiv:2607. 08456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A model should refuse two different things: answers it would get wrong, and questions it should not answer at all, such as unanswerable ones or ones resting on a false premise.
arXiv:2609.14825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often deemed unsafe for clinical question answering because of their tendency to hallucinate. Retrieval augmentation...
LAVOIR is a single‑pass decision encoder that not only predicts answers to typed questions but also identifies which missing pieces of information (slots) would most improve its confidence. By placing candidate slots next to answer options, one forward pass yields both the decision distribution and the expected value of asking each slot, without requiring human labels. In controlled experiments, LAVOIR’s question policy matches a greedy oracle and improves accuracy by up to 14.1 points over never asking, while on real conversations it raises accuracy by 8.3 points with minimal questioning.
The paper introduces a diagnostic for reference‑free judge gates in text‑space skill optimization. It formalizes a judge as a latent solver, deriving a closed‑form bound on discriminability (ROC‑AUC) in terms of judge competence and answer‑space size, and shows that discriminability is confounded by item difficulty unless a within‑question estimator is used. A non‑intervening probe demonstrates that discriminability is at chance near the competence floor, rises above it, and that the diagnostic can predict gating errors in closed‑loop experiments.
arXiv:2608. 11922v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy is a strong answer-selection rule in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for question answering: across five QA benchmarks, selecting the answer a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean $F_1$ from 0.