LLMs are not (consistently) Bayesian: Quantifying internal (in)consistencies of LLMs' probabilistic beliefs
Modern AI systems are being deployed in complex domains such as medicine, science, and law, where it is important that they not only produce correct answers, but also represent and update uncertain beliefs about the world as new evidence arrives. We introduce the novel technique of studying LLMs as information processing rules and utilize the information processing gap to study the internal (in)consistencies of how LLMs update their probabilistic beliefs from evidence. Our extensive experiments evaluate multiple approaches in which LLMs can incorporate evidence into their beliefs. Some of these approaches produce (nearly) Bayesian updates; others seem to use a learned heuristic. Surprisin...
| Authors | Chacha Chen, Matthew Jörke, Adam Goliński et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 7 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 May 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 Information may be incomplete or out of date.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.