arXiv:2605. 24528v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real world decision-making requires constructing mental models under uncertainty over evidence, over the underlying causal rules, and over the state of the world itself.
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The paper proposes a distributional theory explaining how large language models (LLMs) incorporate external evidence into their decision-making process. It identifies three key predictions: (1) evidence is more persuasive when it aligns with the model’s prior beliefs, (2) models more readily accept errors from their own internal processes than from external sources, and (3) the same evidence can improve weaker models while harming stronger ones. Extensive experiments across ten million trials, twelve LLMs from four families, and eight domains—including quantum mechanics, physics, genetics, and molecular biology—confirm these predictions and reveal that evidence integration occurs late in the network as a structured sequence of steps rather than through a simple trust metric.
The paper introduces a computational model that encodes symbolic knowledge as mental programs combining natural language and source code, and uses LLM-guided Bayesian learning to sequentially infer these programs. It demonstrates that this approach satisfies data‑efficiency, uncertainty handling, and flexibility, reproducing human inductive learning and active inquiry behaviors such as anchoring and garden‑pathing. In contrast, pure LLMs and classic Bayesian models either fail the task, do not match human behavior, or require prohibitive computational resources.
The paper investigates how agentic systems decide between acting and abstaining, focusing on the fidelity of their reasoning explanations. Using Qwen3‑8B in a multi‑party conversation setting, the authors compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning, finding a trade‑off: strong direct policies yield higher performance but no traceable reasoning, while reasoning policies provide an audit trail at the cost of lower recall. The study also uncovers that exposing reasoning can alter the agent’s policy and that common faithfulness metrics may overstate the alignment between reasoning and decisions.
arXiv:2606. 30850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are typically deployed in multi-turn conversations, where each turn provides new evidence that should reduce epistemic uncertainty about their environment.
arXiv:2604.27251v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicite...
arXiv:2608. 15687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of a language model to change its answer to match a user's stated belief, is a common alignment failure.