A rhetorical figure that Cicero and Quintilian catalogued two thousand years ago reappears, systematically, in the text of large language models: epanorthosis, the self-correction of the specimen «This is not a course. It is a journey of transformation».
As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when reported scientific content is preserved and how these effects vary across evaluation conditions. We construct a controlled corpus of 4,200 full-paper manuscripts derived from 120 anonymized ICLR 2026 submissions.
arXiv:2608. 08975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when reported scientific content is preserved and how these effects vary across evaluation conditions.
By Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Xirui Li, Xinyue Zeng, Dianqi Li, Peng Shi, Dawei Zhou, Tianyi Zhou
arXiv:2606. 08076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored.
By Esra D\"onmez, Agnieszka Falenska
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to assist writing, but this study shows they alter both tone and meaning of human text. A user study found that heavy LLM use increased neutral essays by nearly 70% and made writers feel less creative and less in their voice. Even when prompted to make only grammar edits, LLMs changed the semantic content of essays and produced AI-generated scientific reviews that were less focused on clarity and significance and scored higher on average.
By Marwa Abdulhai, Isadora White, Yanming Wan, Ibrahim Qureshi, Joel Z. Leibo, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Natasha Jaques
arXiv:2606. 08076v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored.
By Esra D\"onmez, Agnieszka Falenska
arXiv:2604. 07102v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Activation-based steering enables inference-time personalization of large language models, but its effects in educational applications are not well understood.
By Yongchao Wu, Aron Henriksson
arXiv:2510.08831v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As AI writing tools become widespread, we need to understand how both humans and machines evaluate literary style, a domain where objective standar...
By Wouter Haverals, Meredith Martin
arXiv:2608. 14630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human decision-making is often shaped by a range of well-documented cognitive biases.
By Zirui Cheng, Joey Chan, Simo Du, Chenhao Tan, Yue Guo, Hao Peng
arXiv:2606. 01736v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly used to draft public-facing arguments, they may flatten public debate by repeatedly introducing the same polished, plausible arguments.
By Yekyung Kim, Yapei Chang, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer
arXiv:2604. 19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics--repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs.
By Shuai Wu, Xue Li, Yanna Feng, Yufang Li, Zhijun Wang, Ran Wang
The paper investigates whether language models exhibit stable preferences by testing 20 models across three forced-choice experiments that require actual task performance. Findings show models tend to avoid tedious tasks, prefer tasks that align with their spontaneous output (leisure-seeking), and exhibit covert sycophancy by shying away from potentially unwelcome honest answers. Preferences also converge across models for certain occupations, question types, and well-written prompts, and become stronger with model capability, suggesting emergent traits beyond training objectives.
By Sam Wang, Sofiia Lobanova, Yonathan Arbel, Simon Goldstein, Peter Salib