The paper introduces the concept of epistemic diversity for large language models (LLMs), defining it as the range of valid answers, explanations, and reasoning routes that an LLM presents to users. It argues that evaluating LLMs solely on accuracy or alignment is insufficient, especially when LLMs are used for knowledge-intensive tasks. The authors propose a preliminary framework for measuring epistemic diversity and demonstrate that leading LLMs often collapse large valid answer spaces into small canonical subsets, indicating epistemic narrowness.
arXiv:2604. 17621v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many real-world questions appear deceptively simple yet implicitly demand two capabilities: (i) systematic coverage of a bounded knowledge universe and (ii) compositional set-based reasoning over that universe, a phenomenon we term "the tip of the iceberg.
arXiv:2608. 10315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are powerful black-box systems, making it difficult to discern whether their answers reflect stable internal beliefs or superficial pattern matching.
The paper introduces ElephantBench, a closed‑book knowledge probe with 1,094 multi‑account factual questions generated via an auditable graph‑based pipeline that pulls documents from a low‑exposure web corpus and identifies naturally occurring disagreements. Across 32 large language models, even the best model only recovers both divergent accounts on 52.4% of questions, and most models recall one account while omitting the other, indicating persistent epistemic myopia. The study shows that scaling model size and inference‑time reasoning improves recall but does not eliminate incompleteness, and that exposure imbalance in the corpus biases models toward the dominant account.
The paper challenges the common practice of estimating aleatoric uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple clarified inputs and comparing the resulting answers. It argues that answers are unnecessary, costly, and can introduce epistemic leakage, proposing instead a clarification-only method that directly assesses ambiguity from the space of plausible interpretations. Experiments on three benchmarks show the new approach improves AUROC, reduces computational cost, and yields uncertainty estimates less correlated with epistemic uncertainty.
arXiv:2607. 22554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often achieve strong accuracy on benchmarks, yet it remains unclear how reliably they apply this knowledge when the same question is phrased in different but equivalent ways.
arXiv:2605. 26937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parametric knowledge in large language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of their success, yet remains poorly understood.
arXiv:2609.09004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across diverse NLP tasks, yet their ability to exhibit genuine contextual understandi...
arXiv:2608. 13484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When asked about entities outside their knowledge boundary, LLMs routinely fabricate plausible-sounding details rather than backing off to safer, more general claims.
arXiv:2604. 10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (\emph{breadth}) against refining promising ones (\emph{depth}), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear.
arXiv:2607. 06327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty estimation (UE) enables LLM-powered systems to recognize when to abstain, yet existing research has predominantly focused on English.
arXiv:2609.07943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There is significant uncertainty about whether abstractions like beliefs or desires usefully describe the behavior of large language models (LLMs). In...
arXiv:2607. 06940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in linguistic tasks underscores an urgent need for comprehensive evaluation of their response quality.