Don't Just Say "I Don't Know"! Self-aligning Large Language Models For Responding To Unknown Questions With Explanations

Abstract

Despite the remarkable abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer questions, they often display a considerable level of overconfidence even when the question does not have a definitive answer. To avoid providing hallucinated answers to these unknown questions, existing studies typically investigate approaches to refusing to answer these questions. In this work, we propose a novel and scal