arXiv:2606. 05403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly act as epistemic proxies, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources to inform decisions.
By Rohan N. Pradhan, Steve Goley
arXiv:2608.29803v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as proxies for human participants in social simulations, yet whether they update their beliefs...
By Lin Chen, Yitong Chen, Yong Li
arXiv:2608. 14630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human decision-making is often shaped by a range of well-documented cognitive biases.
By Zirui Cheng, Joey Chan, Simo Du, Chenhao Tan, Yue Guo, Hao Peng
The study examines how language models (LMs) alter the expressed certainty of statements when rewriting text, a process termed certainty distortion. Using an LM‑based metric aligned with human judgments, the authors find that up to 75% of LM outputs exhibit such distortion, with most models more likely to inflate certainty than reduce it. Repeated paraphrasing can amplify this effect, especially in medical contexts, and while prompt interventions help, they do not fully eliminate the bias.
By Catarina G Belem, Shang Wu, Hongyu Yao, Mark Steyvers, Sameer Singh, Padhraic Smyth
arXiv:2607. 01951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted on contested scientific questions, raising the concern that they will sycophantically retreat from established consensus when a user signals doubt -- drifting toward a false balance that treats settled science as one view among several.
By Minjong Cheon
The paper introduces a prompt-response concept model that links the amount of task-relevant information in a prompt to the uncertainty of responses generated by large language models (LLMs). It identifies four sources of response uncertainty—prompt underspecification, model quality, task variability, and semantic redundancy—and demonstrates that uncertainty decreases as prompt informativeness or model quality increases, analogous to epistemic uncertainty in probabilistic models. Experiments on real-world datasets confirm the theoretical predictions and validate the model.
By Ze Yu Zhang, Arun Verma, Finale Doshi-Velez, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low