The Commit-Abstain Circuit: Why Language Models Hallucinate Instead of Abstaining

Abstract

Language models (LMs) often hallucinate by committing to confident answers rather than abstaining, even when they do not have enough information to answer reliably. A large body of existing work mitigates hallucination through detection or abstention mechanisms, but leaves open how models internally arrive at the decision to commit or abstain in the first place. We study this decision through mechanistic analysis, framing hallucination as unsupported commitment: the model commits despite exhibiting signals of unanswerability. Using causal gating, we identify a Commit-Abstain Circuit (CAC), a sparse, causally localised subset of attention heads and MLP sublayers underlying this decision. Across ten LMs (3B-14B) from five families and three benchmarks, the CAC exhibits a recurring accumulate-yet-undercorrect pattern: commitment-promoting components build up commitment in earlier layers, while abstention-promoting components act later as corrective signals that are often insufficient to overturn the accumulated commitment. Building on this finding, a lightweight policy trained on CAC activations improves decision accuracy by 12.2 points over the model's intrinsic commit-abstain margin, reduces false abstentions by 2.5 times, transfers to unseen benchmarks, and extends to larger models (27B-35B). The CAC is both diagnostic, clarifying how models overcommit, and practical, enabling improved abstention decisions.