arXiv AI

What Models Know, How Well They Know It: Knowledge-Weighted Fine-Tuning for Learning When to Say "I Don't Know"

The paper introduces Knowledge-Weighted Fine‑Tuning, a method that estimates an instance‑level knowledge score through multi‑sampled inference and uses it to scale the learning signal. This approach encourages large language models to explicitly say "I don't know" on out‑of‑scope queries while preserving accuracy on known questions. The authors also propose new evaluation metrics for uncertainty, demonstrating that better discrimination between known and unknown instances improves overall performance.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

ConfRAG: Confidence-Guided Retrieval-Augmenting Generation

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.

By Yin Huang, Yifan Ethan Xu, Kai Sun, Vera Yan, Alicia Sun, Haidar Khan, Jimmy Nguyen, Jingxiang Chen, Mohammad Kachuee, Zhaojiang Lin, Yue Liu, Aaron Colak, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

LLMs learn different forms of metacognition when trained to predict their own accuracy

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