Truth for Believable AI: Expressed Doubt, Provenance, and Belief Revision as an Engineerable Stance

arXiv:2609.26035 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-22 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-22

Updated: 2026-09-22

Comments: 17 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. Companion framework paper: arXiv:2607.15883. Code, benchmark, cached model outputs, and result files archived at doi:10.5281/zenodo.21462986 (code and results) and doi:10.5281/zenodo.21462988 (benchmark dataset)

Code: https://github.com/cochinescu/truth-llm-prototype

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

Terminology

• Provenance — 43× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Consistency — 25× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Benchmark — 20× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AUC — 19× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 16× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 13× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Ablation — 12× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Fidelity — 12× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Association for Computational Linguistics — 9× in this paper
• Abstention — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Robustness — 7× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Degeneracy — 6× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Hallucination — 5× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Clustering — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing — 4× in this paper
• Alignment — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Sycophancy — 3× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• In International Conference on Learning Representations — 2× in this paper
• Accountability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptability — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agent Memory — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Domain Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Elias — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Hallucination Detection — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Introspection — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Pragmatics — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• RAG — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection
• Linguistic Calibration of Long-Form Generations
• Attributed Question Answering: Evaluation and Modeling for Attributed Large Language Models
• Entropy in Conversational AI: Structured Unpredictability as Inferrable Interiority
• Perceived AGI: Believability as Dimensional Completeness, Not Capability
• Fundamental Problems With Model Editing: How Should Rational Belief Revision Work in LLMs?
• Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
• Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation
• Belief Memory: Agent Memory Under Partial Observability
• Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words
• Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT
• Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer
• Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models
• Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Tasks
• Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs
• Alignment for Honesty

Related papers

• Exploring Solution Divergence and Its Effect on Large Language Model Problem Solving
• Ishigaki-IDS-Bench: A Benchmark for Generating Information Delivery Specification from BIM Information Requirements
• Subliminal Steering: Stronger Encoding of Hidden Signals
• MedStruct-S: A Benchmark for Key Discovery, Key-Conditioned QA and Semi-Structured Extraction from OCR Clinical Reports
• The End of Transformers? On Challenging Attention and the Rise of Sub-Quadratic Architectures
• Untangling the Mechanisms of Misleading Context in Medical Question Answering