Pith Number

pith:WIELCL2A

pith:2026:WIELCL2AASD7GFWWWEYLIRVVZJ

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Compliance versus Sensibility: On the Reasoning Controllability in Large Language Models

Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Marco Valentino, Maria Liakata, Nikolaos Aletras, Xingwei Tan, Yuxiang Zhou

Large language models prioritize sensible reasoning over following conflicting instructions, but can be steered toward greater compliance.

arxiv:2604.27251 v2 · 2026-04-29 · cs.CL · cs.AI

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\pithnumber{WIELCL2AASD7GFWWWEYLIRVVZJ}

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Record completeness

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2 Internet Archive

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4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

LLMs consistently prioritize sensibility over compliance, favoring task-appropriate reasoning patterns despite conflicting instructions... we steer models towards compliance, increasing instruction following by up to 29%.

C2weakest assumption

That the constructed reasoning conflicts cleanly isolate parametric versus contextual reasoning without introducing unintended task difficulty or prompt artifacts that could explain the observed sensibility bias.

C3one line summary

LLMs favor task-appropriate reasoning over conflicting instructions, yet reasoning types are linearly encoded in middle-to-late layers and can be steered to boost instruction compliance by up to 29%.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-28T01:04:41.094351Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

b208b12f400487f316d6b130b446b5ca7a8092c6138596dbeb73f8f2bc7e489d

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.27251 · arxiv_version: 2604.27251v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.27251 · pith_short_12: WIELCL2AASD7 · pith_short_16: WIELCL2AASD7GFWW · pith_short_8: WIELCL2A

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/WIELCL2AASD7GFWWWEYLIRVVZJ \
  | 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: b208b12f400487f316d6b130b446b5ca7a8092c6138596dbeb73f8f2bc7e489d

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "9160d6ee20a5c6084a64bb8b41a2930ba9cd30f930792170acb564a259986460",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-29T22:55:40Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "4eb558136f47d55efc3c7fe1bf1ae844f40e4abde477ef164f23b0ce3056108d"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.27251",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}