Characterizing LLM Abstention Behavior in Science QA with Context Perturbations

arXiv:2404.12452v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The correct model response in the face of uncertainty is to abstain from answering a question so as not to mislead the user. In this work, we study the ability of LLMs to abstain from answering context-dependent science questions when provided insufficient or incorrect context. We probe model sensitivity in several settings: removing gold context, replacing gold context with irrelevant context, and providing additional context beyond what is given. In experiments on four QA datasets …

abstract arxiv behavior context cs.cl face llm llms question questions science study type uncertainty work