Function vectors steer LLMs successfully where the logit lens fails to decode the target answer, showing the two properties come apart.
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Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting
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As large language models (LLMs) are adopted as a fundamental component of language technologies, it is crucial to accurately characterize their performance. Because choices in prompt design can strongly influence model behavior, this design process is critical in effectively using any modern pre-trained generative language model. In this work, we focus on LLM sensitivity to a quintessential class of meaning-preserving design choices: prompt formatting. We find that several widely used open-source LLMs are extremely sensitive to subtle changes in prompt formatting in few-shot settings, with performance differences of up to 76 accuracy points when evaluated using LLaMA-2-13B. Sensitivity remains even when increasing model size, the number of few-shot examples, or performing instruction tuning. Our analysis suggests that work evaluating LLMs with prompting-based methods would benefit from reporting a range of performance across plausible prompt formats, instead of the currently-standard practice of reporting performance on a single format. We also show that format performance only weakly correlates between models, which puts into question the methodological validity of comparing models with an arbitrarily chosen, fixed prompt format. To facilitate systematic analysis we propose FormatSpread, an algorithm that rapidly evaluates a sampled set of plausible prompt formats for a given task, and reports the interval of expected performance without accessing model weights. Furthermore, we present a suite of analyses that characterize the nature of this sensitivity, including exploring the influence of particular atomic perturbations and the internal representation of particular formats.
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LLM information retrieval shows a U-shaped performance drop as words are fragmented by inserted whitespace, attributed to a disordered transition between word-level and character-level processing modes.
A new paired-prompt protocol reveals alignment-pipeline-specific heterogeneity in how open-weight LLMs respond to evaluation versus deployment framings.
SPAGBias reveals that LLMs form nuanced gender associations with specific urban micro-spaces that exceed real-world distributions and produce failures in planning and descriptive tasks.
Popular LLM activation steering methods are shown to act as proportional controllers; a PID steering framework is proposed that improves robustness and outperforms baselines in experiments across model families.
Domain specialization does not consistently improve clinical LLM robustness to meaning-preserving prompt variations, as shown by new sensitivity metrics on DiagnosisQA and MedQA.
Persona prefixes reduce brand recommendation Jaccard similarity by 0.12-0.20, with mid-market brands swapping up to 75% of recommendations while category leaders remain ~80% consistent across OpenAI and Anthropic models.
Configuration choices alone flip pairwise safety verdicts on every tested alignment benchmark, isolated via a finite-envelope proposition linking disagreement rate to strict ordering reversal.
Paraphrase Jaccard similarity of 0.135-0.288 falls below the 0.50-0.61 same-prompt rerun baseline on OpenAI and Anthropic models, showing prompt wording dominates buyer intent in commercial recommendations.
Introduces AIR, an asymmetric regularization that anchors open-ended safety prompts to verifiable ones via stop-gradient, improving invariance and accuracy when combined with group preference optimization.
Minor perturbations in persona format, instruction framing, and network structure shift cooperation by up to 76 percentage points and polarization metrics consistently, showing that LLM social simulations require per-claim robustness audits via the new TRAILS taxonomy.
CUDABEAVER benchmark and pass@k(M,C,A) metric show LLM CUDA debugging success drops by up to 40 percentage points under strict performance requirements.
Global Bradley-Terry rankings of LLMs are misleading due to structured heterogeneity in user preferences, and small (λ, ν)-portfolios recover coherent subpopulations that cover over 96% of votes with just five rankings.
LLM safety judges flip verdicts on equivalent policy rewrites up to 9.1% of the time and cannot distinguish meaningful from meaningless changes, requiring new invariance-based reliability metrics.
LLMs show systematic output-mode collapse on closed-form prompts, with only ~22% of semantically equivalent variants preserving the requested bare-label format across five models and four tasks.
Multi-variant testing reveals that prompt design and evaluator choices can change apparent model reliability by large margins, with verbal confidence often overstated and robustness uncorrelated with size.
Counterfactual prompting effects on LLMs are often indistinguishable from those caused by meaning-preserving paraphrases, causing most previously reported demographic sensitivities to disappear under proper statistical comparison.
POES frames prompt evaluation as online adaptive testing and uses a provably submodular objective to pick informative examples, delivering 6.2% higher average accuracy and 35-60% token savings versus naive full-set scoring.
Language models deploy multidimensional internal confidence representations and threshold-based policies to control abstention behavior, with causal support from activation steering experiments.
Multi-LLM committees amplify small input perturbations into divergent deliberation trajectories and decisions under deterministic conditions.
PromptSuite is a modular, extensible, task-agnostic framework for automatically generating diverse prompt variations to support robust multi-prompt LLM evaluation.
Fine-tuning LLMs on the SubPOP dataset of 3,362 questions and 70K pairs reduces the gap between LLM predictions and human survey responses by up to 46% and generalizes to unseen surveys and subpopulations.
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