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Large language models are not robust multiple choice selectors

23 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 22 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.

23 Pith papers citing it
22 external citations · Pith
abstract

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) serve as a common yet important task format in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs). This work shows that modern LLMs are vulnerable to option position changes in MCQs due to their inherent "selection bias", namely, they prefer to select specific option IDs as answers (like "Option A"). Through extensive empirical analyses with 20 LLMs on three benchmarks, we pinpoint that this behavioral bias primarily stems from LLMs' token bias, where the model a priori assigns more probabilistic mass to specific option ID tokens (e.g., A/B/C/D) when predicting answers from the option IDs. To mitigate selection bias, we propose a label-free, inference-time debiasing method, called PriDe, which separates the model's prior bias for option IDs from the overall prediction distribution. PriDe first estimates the prior by permutating option contents on a small number of test samples, and then applies the estimated prior to debias the remaining samples. We demonstrate that it achieves interpretable and transferable debiasing with high computational efficiency. We hope this work can draw broader research attention to the bias and robustness of modern LLMs.

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2026 21 2025 2

representative citing papers

Large Language Models Lack Temporal Awareness of Medical Knowledge

cs.LG · 2026-05-13 · unverdicted · novelty 8.0

LLMs lack temporal awareness of medical knowledge, showing gradual performance decline on up-to-date facts, much lower accuracy on historical knowledge (25-54% relative), and inconsistent year-to-year predictions.

AI Achieves a Perfect LSAT Score

cs.AI · 2026-04-11 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Language models achieve a perfect LSAT score, with experiments showing that internal thinking phases and a fine-tuned process reward model are key to high performance on logical reasoning questions.

MANTA: Multi-turn Assessment for Nonhuman Thinking & Alignment

cs.CY · 2026-04-18 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

MANTA is a new multi-turn dynamic benchmark that stress-tests frontier LLMs on animal welfare alignment by generating targeted adversarial follow-ups and scoring across 13 dimensions, with preliminary results showing variance in later turns and format bias in LLM judges.

Position: AI Evaluations Should be Grounded on a Theory of Capability

cs.AI · 2025-09-23 · conditional · novelty 5.0

AI evaluations should be reframed as inference tasks grounded in an explicit theory of capability, with an empirical demonstration that results depend on modeling assumptions and a proposed Evaluation Card for transparency.

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Showing 23 of 23 citing papers.