Beyond "I Don't Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertainty
Reliable Large Language Models (LLMs) should abstain when confidence is insufficient. However, prior studies often treat refusal as a generic "I don't know'', failing to distinguish input-level ambiguity (data uncertainty) from capability limitations (model uncertainty). This lack of distinction limits downstream action decisions like requesting clarification or invoking external tools. In this work, we introduce UA-Bench, a benchmark of over 3,500 questions drawn from six datasets spanning knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks, designed to evaluate explicit uncertainty attribution. An evaluation of 18 frontier LLMs shows that even state-of-the-art models struggle to reliably ...
| Authors | Jingyi Ren, Ante Wang, Yunghwei Lai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.