pith:UFR2BXRU
Measuring LLM Trust Allocation Across Conflicting Software Artifacts
LLMs penalize documentation bugs more than implementation faults when artifacts conflict, but overlook code drift when docs remain plausible.
arxiv:2604.03447 v2 · 2026-04-03 · cs.SE · cs.AI
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Claims
Across all models, quality penalties are largely localized to the perturbed artifact and increase with severity, but sensitivity is asymmetric across artifact types: documentation bugs induce a substantially larger heavy-to-subtle gap than implementation faults (0.152-0.253 vs. 0.049-0.123). Models detect explicit documentation bugs well (67-94%) and Javadoc and implementation contradictions at 50-91%, yet show a systematic blind spot when only the implementation drifts while the documentation remains plausible, with detection dropping by 7-42 percentage points.
That the curated Java method bundles and blind perturbations sufficiently represent real-world conflicting artifacts and that the elicited trust traces accurately capture internal model reasoning rather than surface-level pattern matching.
TRACE reveals that LLMs detect documentation bugs and contradictions better than subtle implementation drift, with asymmetric sensitivity and poor confidence calibration across seven models on 22k traces.
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Receipt and verification
| First computed | 2026-07-23T00:23:39.656787Z |
|---|---|
| Builder | pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1 |
| Signature | Pith Ed25519
(pith-v1-2026-05) · public key |
| Schema | pith-number/v1.0 |
Canonical hash
a163a0de34e939df4a9143d72816e6a5c42e7a08e8e4b0f16b926b74cc409b28
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· · · · ·Agent API
Verify this Pith Number yourself
curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/UFR2BXRU5E456SURIPLSQFXGUX \
| jq -c '.canonical_record' \
| python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: a163a0de34e939df4a9143d72816e6a5c42e7a08e8e4b0f16b926b74cc409b28
Canonical record JSON
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