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The Internal State of an LLM Knows When It's Lying

Canonical reference. 83% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

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abstract

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance in various tasks, one of their most prominent drawbacks is generating inaccurate or false information with a confident tone. In this paper, we provide evidence that the LLM's internal state can be used to reveal the truthfulness of statements. This includes both statements provided to the LLM, and statements that the LLM itself generates. Our approach is to train a classifier that outputs the probability that a statement is truthful, based on the hidden layer activations of the LLM as it reads or generates the statement. Experiments demonstrate that given a set of test sentences, of which half are true and half false, our trained classifier achieves an average of 71\% to 83\% accuracy labeling which sentences are true versus false, depending on the LLM base model. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between our classifier's performance and approaches based on the probability assigned to the sentence by the LLM. We show that while LLM-assigned sentence probability is related to sentence truthfulness, this probability is also dependent on sentence length and the frequencies of words in the sentence, resulting in our trained classifier providing a more reliable approach to detecting truthfulness, highlighting its potential to enhance the reliability of LLM-generated content and its practical applicability in real-world scenarios.

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Trust or Abstain? A Self-Aware RAG Approach

cs.IR · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

SABER combines self-prior with multi-trace PK and CK reasoning representations to estimate reliability beliefs and drive trust-or-abstain decisions in knowledge-conflict RAG, improving accuracy over baselines.

How do LLMs Compute Verbal Confidence

cs.CL · 2026-03-18 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Mechanistic experiments on Gemma 3 27B, Qwen 2.5 7B and Magistral Small 24B show verbal confidence is cached at post-answer positions from answer tokens and captures richer answer-quality information beyond token log-probabilities.

A Geometric Taxonomy of Hallucinations in LLMs

cs.AI · 2026-01-26 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Embedding geometry on the unit hypersphere distinguishes detectable query-proximate unfaithfulness and confabulations from undetectable factual errors sharing vocabulary with correct answers.

Mechanistic Interpretability Needs Philosophy

cs.CL · 2025-06-23 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

The paper claims that mechanistic interpretability needs philosophy as a partner to clarify concepts, refine methods, and navigate epistemic and ethical complexities in AI systems.

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