AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions
Authors: name: Polina Kirichenko, name: Mark Ibrahim, name: Kamalika Chaudhuri, name: Samuel J. Bell

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and
high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as
answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified,
ill-posed, or fundamentally unanswerable, require LLMs to reason about
uncertainty and selectively abstain -- i.e., refuse to answer definitively.
However, abstention remains understudied, without a systematic evaluation
framework for modern LLMs. In this work, we introduce AbstentionBench, a
large-scale benchmark for holistically evaluating abstention across 20 diverse
datasets, including questions with unknown answers, underspecification, false
premises, subjective interpretations, and outdated information. Evaluating 20
frontier LLMs reveals abstention is an unsolved problem, and one where scaling
models is of little use. While recent reasoning LLMs have shown impressive
results in complex problem solving, surprisingly, we find that reasoning
fine-tuning degrades abstention (by 24% on average), even for math and
science domains on which reasoning models are explicitly trained. We find that
while a carefully crafted system prompt can boost abstention in practice, it
does not resolve models' fundamental inability to reason about uncertainty. We
release AbstentionBench to foster research into advancing LLM reliability.