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4 open-access journal articles on abstention, published in 2026 in Life of Research. Every record is free to read and download, with a permanent link and a ready-made citation.
Journal article
A language model that declines to answer is scored the same way whether the reason is that the question has several readings and it picked the wrong one, or that the question has one reading and the model does not know the fact it names. AbstentionBench (Kirichenko et al., 2025) makes the…
Journal article
A retrieval-augmented system that answers only when its retrieved context suffices needs a predicate that says when it does. Three incompatible predicates are in circulation under the word "sufficient", and results obtained under different ones are routinely compared as though they measured one…
Journal article
An agent that declines to send the email has made a decision that looks like the decision a language model makes when it declines to answer a question, and the resemblance has organised the 2026 literature into two camps. One reads not-acting as a calibration problem: the agent should estimate its…
Journal article
Contradiction detection occupies an unusual position among proposals for making a language model check itself. Comparing two of a model's own outputs appears to need no external oracle, which makes it look like the one exception to the observation that working hallucination detectors sit outside…