Neural language models (LMs)  can be used to evaluate the truth of factual statements in two ways: they can be eitherqueriedfor statement probabilities, orprobedfor internal representations of truthfulness.
Past work has found that these two procedures sometimes disagree, and that probes tend to be more accurate than LM outputs. This has led some researchers to conclude that LMs “lie” or otherwise encode non-cooperative communicative intents.
Is this an accurate description of today’s LMs, or can query–probe disagreement arise in other ways? We identify three different classes of disagreement, which we termconfabulation,deception, andheterogeneity.
In many cases, the superiority of probes is simply attributable to better calibration on uncertain answers rather than a greater fraction of correct, high-confidence answers.
In some cases, queries and probes perform better on different subsets of inputs, and accuracy can further be improved by ensembling the two.111Code atgithub.com/lingo-mit/lm-truthfulness.