When and How Should an Agent Clarify? CIGAsk: Teaching LLMs to Clarify via Counterfactual Information Gain
Instruction-tuned LLMs faced with underspecified queries often commit to a single interpretation rather than ask for clarification, producing confidently wrong answers. In our experiments, prompting alone is insufficient: models either ask for clarification on every query or ask vague questions that fail to recover the missing information. Addressing this failure requires learning two coupled skills: when to ask rather than answer and how to ask a question that recovers the disambiguating information. Existing recipes either address only one of these skills or require a separately trained critic. We propose CIGAsk, an RL recipe that teaches both skills through two complementary reward sig...
| Authors | Yunxiang Li, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 21 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 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 Information may be incomplete or out of date.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.