You Only Pass Once: Answering and Abstaining Together in a Single Forward Pass of a Frozen Language Model

A frozen language model on reasoning tasks has two coupled weaknesses: it under-uses evidence its own residual stream already encodes, and it fails to detect when the input is insufficient to answer, so it confabulates.

A frozen language model on reasoning tasks has two coupled weaknesses: it under-uses evidence its own residual stream already encodes, and it fails to detect when the input is insufficient to answer, so it confabulates. This paper consolidates two research lines that address…