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arXiv AI By Pranav Aggarwal

Calibrated Enough to Know, Not Calibrated to Act: Fabricated Evidence Makes LLM Agents Commit to the Unknowable

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The study shows that large language model (LLM) agents are far more likely to commit to a directional prediction when presented with a professional‑looking market panel than when asked the same question directly, with commitment rates rising from 6.5% to 54.0% across 12 frontier models. Even when the panel’s data is entirely fabricated, commitment still increases significantly, indicating that the authority of the presentation, rather than the truth of the information, drives confident action. The authors demonstrate that this act/don’t‑act decision gate is narrow, model‑specific, and can be mitigated through supervised fine‑tuning, though its effectiveness depends on response format and context. whyItMatters":"The findings reveal a specific vulnerability in LLMs where presentation style can override factual accuracy, highlighting the need for careful design and training to prevent misleading confidence in uncertain scenarios."

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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