LLMs Are Overconfident and Oblivious to Details; Abductive Preference Learning Fixes It

qi2peng2 · x · 2026-09-30

Researchers found that LMs large or small, text-only or multimodal, share a flaw: overconfidence and obliviousness to details. Faced with uncommon scenarios, they confidently take shortcuts baked in by pretraining data (a dog-like picture gets "four legs", "Paris" for the last Olympics). Simple finetuning can't cure it, but a modified preference learning technique — Abductive Preference Learning, to be presented at COLM 2026 — solves it.

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