On the Tip of the Tongue: First-Token Cueing as a Behavioral Probe of Recall Failures in LLMs
Large language models often answer factual questions incorrectly in closed-book settings, and such errors are usually attributed to missing knowledge. Yet models often encode answers they fail to produce. We show that many closed-book errors are first-token recall failures: the model commits to a wrong first token, but once given the right one it completes the answer and often recognizes it as correct. We study this with First-Token Cueing, a behavioral probe that prefills the response with the first token of the gold answer. Model uncertainty peaks at the first answer token, where it already predicts correctness, and among gold prefixes of any length the first token alone accounts for th...
| Authors | Jaewon Sok, Jewon Yeom, Seonghyeon Park et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
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