AAAI 2026

January 25, 2026

Singapore, Singapore

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce fluent but factually incorrect responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Abstention, where the model chooses not to answer and instead outputs phrases such as "I don't know", is a common safeguard. However, existing abstention methods typically rely on post-generation signals, such as generation variations or feedback, which limits their ability to prevent unreliable responses in advance. In this paper, we introduce Aspect-Based Causal Abstention (ABCA), a new framework that enables early abstention by analysing the internal diversity of LLM knowledge through causal inference. This diversity reflects the multifaceted nature of parametric knowledge acquired from various sources, representing diverse aspects such as disciplines, legal contexts, or temporal frames. ABCA estimates causal effects conditioned on these aspects to assess the reliability of knowledge relevant to a given query. Based on these estimates, we enable two types of abstention: Type-1, where aspect effects are inconsistent (knowledge conflict), and Type-2, where aspect effects consistently support abstention (knowledge insufficiency). Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that ABCA improves abstention reliability, achieves state-of-the-art performance, and enhances the interpretability of abstention decisions. The source code and technical appendix are provided in the Supplementary Material.

Downloads

Paper

Next from AAAI 2026

DeNAS-ViT: Data Efficient NAS-Optimized Vision Transformer for Ultrasound Image Segmentation
poster

DeNAS-ViT: Data Efficient NAS-Optimized Vision Transformer for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

AAAI 2026

+1
Renqi Chen and 3 other authors

25 January 2026

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2025 Underline - All rights reserved