{"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/self-consistency-of-large-language-models","title":"Self-Consistency of Large Language Models under Ambiguity","arxiv_id":"2310.13439","date":"2023-10-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Henning Bartsch","Ole Jorgensen","Domenic Rosati","Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier","Jacob Pfau"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) that do not give consistent answers across contexts are problematic when used for tasks with expectations of consistency, e.g., question-answering, explanations, etc. Our work presents an evaluation benchmark for self-consistency in cases of under-specification where two or more answers can be correct. We conduct a series of behavioral experiments on the OpenAI model suite using an ambiguous integer sequence completion task. We find that average consistency ranges from 67\\% to 82\\%, far higher than would be predicted if a model's consistency was random, and increases as model capability improves. Furthermore, we show that models tend to maintain self-consistency across a series of robustness checks, including prompting speaker changes and sequence length changes. These results suggest that self-consistency arises as an emergent capability without specifically training for it. Despite this, we find that models are uncalibrated when judging their own consistency, with models displaying both over- and under-confidence. We also propose a nonparametric test for determining from token output distribution whether a model assigns non-trivial probability to alternative answers. Using this test, we find that despite increases in self-consistency, models usually place significant weight on alternative, inconsistent answers. This distribution of probability mass provides evidence that even highly self-consistent models internally compute multiple possible responses.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13439v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13439v1.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":"self-consistency-of-large-language-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/jacobpfau/introspective-self-consistency","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.13439","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}