Mirage of Mastery: Memorization Tricks LLMs into Artificially Inflated Self-Knowledge

When artificial intelligence mistakes memorization for intelligence, it creates a dangerous mirage of reasoning. Existing studies treat memorization and self-knowledge deficits in LLMs as separate issues and do not recognize an intertwining link that degrades the trustworthiness of LLM responses. In our study, we utilize a novel framework to ascertain if LLMs genuinely learn reasoning patterns from training data or merely memorize them to assume competence across problems of similar complexity focused on STEM domains. Our analysis shows a noteworthy problem in generalization: LLMs draw confidence from memorized solutions to infer a higher self-knowledge about their reasoning ability, which manifests as an over 45% inconsistency in feasibility assessments when faced with self-validated, logically coherent task perturbations. This effect is most pronounced in science and medicine domains, which tend to have maximal standardized jargon and problems, further confirming our approach. Significant wavering within the self-knowledge of LLMs also shows flaws in current architectures and training patterns, highlighting the need for techniques that ensure a balanced, consistent stance on models' perceptions of their own knowledge for maximum AI explainability and trustworthiness. Our code and results are available publicly at https://github.com/knowledge-verse-ai/LLM-Memorization_SK_Eval-.

Line of Duty: Evaluating LLM Self-Knowledge via Consistency in Feasibility Boundaries

As LLMs grow more powerful, their most profound achievement may be recognising when to say "I don't know". Existing studies on LLM self-knowledge have been largely constrained by human-defined notions of feasibility, often neglecting the reasons behind unanswerability by LLMs and failing to study deficient types of self-knowledge. This study aims to obtain intrinsic insights into different types of LLM self-knowledge with a novel methodology: allowing them the flexibility to set their own feasibility boundaries and then analysing the consistency of these limits. We find that even frontier models like GPT-4o and Mistral Large are not sure of their own capabilities more than 80% of the time, highlighting a significant lack of trustworthiness in responses. Our analysis of confidence balance in LLMs indicates that models swing between overconfidence and conservatism in feasibility boundaries depending on task categories and that the most significant self-knowledge weaknesses lie in temporal awareness and contextual understanding. These difficulties in contextual comprehension additionally lead models to question their operational boundaries, resulting in considerable confusion within the self-knowledge of LLMs. We make our code and results available publicly at https://github.com/knowledge-verse-ai/LLM-Self_Knowledge_Eval