Epistemic Warrant for LLM Recommendations: Characterizing the Basis for Reliance When Ground Truth Is Unavailable· 大模型推荐的理论依据

Large language models are increasingly used to support organizational decisions, yet users often lack a principled basis for assessing whether to rely on a specific recommendation. Existing approaches typically evaluate broad model properties, such as reliability, uncertainty, or robustness, or focus on user trust, rather than the underlying basis for relying on an individual recommendation. Adapting theoretical foundations from epistemology, we introduce epistemic warrant, a decision-level construct that characterizes the stability of a model's preference and the scope over which that preference holds. We operationalize this construct through a four-tier reliance certificate for pairwise recommendations, distinguishing among unstable, context-dependent, locally supported, and broadly supp