We found a striking failure mode in DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: unfaithful recall โ false introspection โ confident confabulation.
The evidence was already in context. The model ignored it, then falsely claimed the material had been removed or never shown.
Thatโs a metacognitive error: it made a false claim about what it had seen.
Worse, it didnโt stop at โI donโt remember.โ It treated the supposed gap as reality and filled it with a plausible story. The result was coherentโand wrong.
Three stacked failures:
Context unfaithfulness: evidence is present, but generation ignores it.
False introspection: it invents a reason for the retrieval miss.
Confabulated defect: it confidently fills the imaginary gap with an explanation or patch.
The dangerous part is (2)+(3): an attention miss gets transformed into โmissing reality,โ and the model acts on the ghost.