arXiv AI

Structured Output Collapses Answer Diversity Across 44 Language Models

arXiv:2607. 18476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model must choose one answer from a large space of equally valid options, a format clause -- "Reply with JSON only" -- changes which answer it chooses.

arXiv AI
Jul 22

Prompt Design at Scale: How Format, Instruction Count, and Context Length Shape Instruction Adherence and Hallucination in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much context a model can hold before recall and honesty degrade.

By Netanel Eliav
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Listening to the Wise Few: Query-Key Alignment Unlocks Latent Correct Answers in Large Language Models

arXiv:2410.02343v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) routinely fail to output the correct option in multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) while encoding the answer int...

By Eduard Tulchinskii, Kristian Kuznetsov, Laida Kushnareva, Anastasia Voznyuk, Andrei Andriiainen, Irina Piontkovskaya, Evgeny Burnaev, Serguei Barannikov
arXiv AI
2d ago

Measuring the Microtask Eligibility Gap: When Is an Off-the-Shelf SLM Enough for an Agent Harness?

The paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating whether off‑the‑shelf small language models (SLMs) can reliably perform microtasks that support a large language model (LLM) planner, such as auto‑approving shell commands, writing memory, selecting tools, and ranking past turns. Using fixed prompts and confidence‑interval‑aware eligibility thresholds, the authors test several Qwen3 models (0.6/1.7/4/8 B) in FP16 with no tuning and find that none of the 16 configurations meet the eligibility criteria. Quantization to 4‑bit precision further degrades performance, with the eligibility gap tracking model size rather than precision, and the issue persists across different models (e.g., Llama‑3.x) and prompt variations.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran