{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/ask-again-then-fail-large-language-models","title":"Ask Again, Then Fail: Large Language Models' Vacillations in Judgment","arxiv_id":"2310.02174","date":"2023-10-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Qiming Xie","Zengzhi Wang","Yi Feng","Rui Xia"],"abstract":"We observe that current conversational language models often waver in their judgments when faced with follow-up questions, even if the original judgment was correct. This wavering presents a significant challenge for generating reliable responses and building user trust. To comprehensively assess this issue, we introduce a \\textsc{Follow-up Questioning Mechanism} along with two metrics to quantify this inconsistency, confirming its widespread presence in current language models. To mitigate this issue, we explore various prompting strategies for closed-source models; moreover, we develop a training-based framework \\textsc{Unwavering-FQ} that teaches language models to maintain their originally correct judgments through synthesized high-quality preference data. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our framework and its ability to enhance the general capabilities of models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02174v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.02174v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"ask-again-then-fail-large-language-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/nustm/llms-waver-in-judgements","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"ask-again-then-fail-large-language-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/nustm/llms-waver-in-judgments","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"negation","task_name":"Negation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.02174","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}