Whether LLMs Can Navigate Beliefs and Facts Depends on How You Phrase It
Humans naturally form and express beliefs in daily communication, e.g., "I think the answer is 3" or "I suppose that's right." Such beliefs inevitably intertwine with fact and knowledge, making the ability to handle them in tandem desirable for large language models (LLMs), as they are increasingly deployed in user-facing settings. Prior work showed that even capable LLMs exhibit a systemic weakness in acknowledging user beliefs grounded in incorrect information. We extend this evaluation to 10 LLMs across 18 epistemic expressions and find that the size and direction of this weakness depend on the verb used to express the belief, with the accuracy gap between factual and false information...
| Authors | Quang Minh Nguyen, Luis Frentzen Salim |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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