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arXiv — cs.AI preprintsInternational5 October 2026

On the Tip of the Tongue: Why LLMs Hallucinate Answers They Can Decode

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arXiv:2603.13911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A language model can give the wrong answer even when the correct answer is decodable from its intermediate states. To study this gap between decodability and selection, we distinguish \textit{read} from \textit{write} at the first answer token. Read asks whether the gold token can be decoded from intermediate residual states under same-relation decoy controls. Write asks whether the final readout ranks that token first among content tokens. Under three different readers, with a randomized-label control, a substantial fraction of failures rema
— arXiv — cs.AI preprints

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