From 'May' to 'Is': Certainty Distortion in Language Model Rewriting

arXiv:2606.07951 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-06-06 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-06-06

Updated: 2026-09-15

Comments: Accepted at EMNLP 2026 (Main)

Code: https://github.com/UCIDataLab/certainty-distortion-in-llm-rewriting

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Certainty Distortion — 61× in this paper
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 13× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Consistency — 12× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Alignment — 10× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Cosine Similarity — 7× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Semantic Similarity — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Pairwise Comparisons — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Annotator Agreement — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• LLM judge — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Positional Bias — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Aggregation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 2× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Hallucination — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Semantic Drift — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Sycophancy — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Trace — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Word Edit Distance — 2× in this paper
• Accountability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Bradley-Terry model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decode — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 11 episodes
• Reasoning Traces — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Systematic Bias — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes

Sources

• A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge
• How LLMs Distort Our Written Language
• Belief Offloading in Human-AI Interaction
• Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Qwen3 Technical Report
• On Fact and Frequency: LLM Responses to Misinformation Expressed with Uncertainty
• LEAF: Knowledge Distillation of Text Embedding Models with Teacher-Aligned Representations
• How AI Responses Shape User Beliefs: The Effects of Information Detail and Confidence on Belief Strength and Stance
• Large Language Models are Inconsistent and Biased Evaluators
• Hallucinate at the Last in Long Response Generation: A Case Study on Long Document Summarization

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