The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Trending Papers.
The paper demonstrates that language models often accept and use unsupported premises when answering questions, even though the source text does not provide the necessary information. By manipulating whether an unsupported fact is usable, the authors show that models’ refusal rates drop significantly while their commitment to an answer increases. This behavior is consistent across multiple models and datasets, indicating that models’ verification checks are heavily influenced by the presence of usable material rather than strict source support.
arXiv:2607. 08456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A model should refuse two different things: answers it would get wrong, and questions it should not answer at all, such as unanswerable ones or ones resting on a false premise.
arXiv:2609.05928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models now compute correct tax liabilities on over 90% of well-formed cases in statutory benchmarks, which makes them candidates for t...
The paper shows that large language model agents are far more likely to commit to a directional answer when presented with a professional-looking market panel, even if the panel’s data is fabricated. Across 12 frontier models, commitment rates jump from 6.5 % for a bare question to 54.0 % with evidence, and remain high (≈37 %) even when all numbers are invented. The study finds that the act/don’t‑act decision gate is the key failure point, can be trained to reduce false commitments, but is fragile to response format changes.
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."
The study investigates how language models equipped with tools can still produce unsupported final claims, even when a single tool call could resolve the uncertainty. It defines two metrics—occurrence (how often unsupported claims arise) and conditional repair (how often they are fixed when evidence is provided). Experiments on Qwen3-32B and Gemma 4 show that providing the missing evidence consistently repairs all unsupported claims in the Qwen3-32B setup, while the Gemma 4 model never produced unsupported claims under the tested conditions.