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Abstract - Bridging the Detection-to-Abstention Gap in Reasoning Models under Insufficient Information
We highlight a failure mode of large reasoning models on questions with insufficient information: models may recognize that a problem is under-specified, yet still continue reasoning and produce unsupported final answers instead of abstaining. We formalize this mismatch as the detection-to-abstention gap, where detected insufficiency fails to translate into final abstention. This gap is especially concerning in high-risk domains such as medical AI, where answers based on incomplete evidence can be more harmful than refusal. To close this gap, we propose Judge-Then-Solve (JTS), a trajectory-level reasoning-control framework that trains models to make an explicit answerability commitment before solution generation. Rather than treating abstention as a final-answer style, JTS casts it as a control decision: the model either proceeds to solve or terminates early based on its answerability judgment. We instantiate this policy through supervised warm-up and missing-premise reinforcement learning with consistency and length-shaping rewards. Experiments on dense and MoE reasoning models show that JTS substantially improves reliable abstention across datasets and pushes Abstention@Detection (A@D) to near-saturation, indicating that models not only detect missing information but also act on that detection. By terminating unanswerable trajectories immediately after the answerability judgment, JTS reduces unnecessary reasoning and improves inference efficiency when continued deliberation would amplify unsupported assumptions. We also observe that missing-premise training can alter reasoning behavior on difficult but answerable problems, reducing unproductive self-reflection. These results suggest that abstention under insufficient information is a key form of reasoning control for deploying reasoning models safely and efficiently.
弥合推理模型在信息不足时的检测与拒绝回答之间的差距 /
Bridging the Detection-to-Abstention Gap in Reasoning Models under Insufficient Information
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文发现大型推理模型在遇到信息不足的问题时,虽然能察觉到问题不完整,却往往仍会继续推理并给出无依据的答案,而非主动拒绝回答;为解决这一危险差距,作者提出了一种“先判断、再求解”的控制框架,通过在生成解决方案前先让模型判断是否可答,若不可答则提前终止推理,从而大幅提升模型在不确定场景下安全拒绝回答的能力,并减少不必要的计算浪费。