# From Evidence to Belief: A Bayesian Epistemology Approach to Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19622/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14975/) (2023)
- [Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06209/) (2017)
- [Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14334/) (2022)
- [Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13702/) (2023)
- [e-SNLI: Natural Language Inference with Natural Language Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01193/) (2018)
- [Experience Grounds Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10151/) (2020)
- [Towards Understanding Chain-of-Thought Prompting: An Empirical Study of What Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10001/) (2022)
- [Fine-tuning Language Models for Factuality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08401/) (2023)
- [Reducing conversational agents' overconfidence through linguistic calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14983/) (2020)
- [On Hallucination and Predictive Uncertainty in Conditional Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15025/) (2021)
- [Navigating the Grey Area: How Expressions of Uncertainty and Overconfidence Affect Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13439/) (2023)
- [How Many Demonstrations Do You Need for In-context Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08119/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Models Capture Dissenting Human Voices?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13788/) (2023)
- [Generic Temporal Reasoning with Differential Analysis and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10467/) (2022)
- [Large Human Language Models: A Need and the Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07751/) (2023)
- [Information Association for Language Model Updating by Mitigating LM-Logical Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18582/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [When Planning Fails Despite Correct Execution: On Epistemic Calibration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23414/) (2026)
- [Belief Engine: Configurable and Inspectable Stance Dynamics in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15343/) (2026)
- [Learning from AVA: Early Lessons from a Curated and Trustworthy Generative AI for Policy and Development Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17843/) (2026)
- [Bayesian Intelligence from the Outside](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14724/) (2026)
- [Bayesian Belief Layer for Controllable Opinion Dynamics in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21997/) (2026)
- [Provenance-Aware Belief Updating in Human-AI Feedback Loops](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13008/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates the knowledge of language models from the perspective of Bayesian epistemology. We explore how language models adjust their confidence and responses when presented with evidence with varying levels of informativeness and reliability. To study these properties, we create a dataset with various types of evidence and analyze language models' responses and confidence using verbalized confidence, token probability, and sampling. We observed that language models do not consistently follow Bayesian epistemology: language models follow the Bayesian confirmation assumption well with true evidence but fail to adhere to other Bayesian assumptions when encountering different evidence types. Also, we demonstrated that language models can exhibit high confidence when given strong evidence, but this does not always guarantee high accuracy. Our analysis also reveals that language models are biased toward golden evidence and show varying performance depending on the degree of irrelevance, helping explain why they deviate from Bayesian assumptions.