The paper investigates how small lexical changes in prompts can cause large performance swings in large language models. Using a dataset of 132,000 prompt variants, the authors uncover a scaling law linking higher average task performance to lower variance and greater robustness. They identify domain-specific terminology and explicit action directives as key linguistic factors that stabilize prompts, and propose an automated Prompt-Refining Agent that reduces performance variance by 40.7% in code generation while maintaining or improving mean performance.
By Qipeng Xie, Zi Liang, Jiafei Wu, Yufei Chen, Weizheng Wang, Wenao Ma, Zhong Ming, Haiqin Yang, Kaishun Wu
arXiv:2603. 23530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks.
By Avni Mittal
arXiv:2604. 22027v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the question is posed.
By Zhuonan Yang, Jacob Xiaochen Li, Francisco Piedrahita Velez, Eric Todd, David Bau, Michael L. Littman, Stephen H. Bach, Ellie Pavlick
As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.
arXiv:2606. 12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs.
By Andy Wang, Parv Mahajan, David Demitri Africa, Alexandra Souly, Jordan Taylor, Robert Kirk
Narcissus is a program synthesizer that uses context‑aware large language model (LLM) approximations to guide enumerative search. Unlike prior methods that convert LLM proposals into rule frequencies and lose structural information, Narcissus retains proposals as syntax trees and scores each program expansion based on its surrounding context, ensuring every rule remains reachable. Across five domains and two search backends, it consistently outperforms static guidance and LLM re‑prompting, solving 40% of ARC tasks that raw proposals only solve 13%, all without any LLM calls during search.
By Tilman Hinnerichs, Sebastijan Dumancic, Neil Yorke-Smith
The paper introduces a three-level evaluation framework—behavioral deployment, LM-head readout, and probe recoverability—to distinguish whether a language model fails a syntactic test by not encoding structure or by failing to use it. Using a trilingual control-dependency benchmark, the authors find that probe recoverability consistently exceeds LM-head readout, which in turn exceeds behavioral deployment across seven models and three languages, with the largest gap observed in Qwen3-0.6B Instruct. Layer-localized activation patching shows that instruction tuning shifts the decoded layer later, suggesting decoding favors surface shortcuts and that behavioral evaluation understates what models encode while probing alone overstates what they deploy.
By Zhenyan Lu, He Wang, Xiaohui Huang
The paper introduces Variance‑Calibrated Modulation (VCM), a training‑free pre‑decoding technique that reshapes language model probability distributions before truncation. VCM uses two dynamic mechanisms: a Contextual Searchlight via PMI to suppress stopwords and highlight context‑relevant tokens, and an Adaptive Self‑Debiasing that applies scale‑invariant penalization based on real‑time logit standard deviation. Experiments on open‑ended generation, factual QA, and mathematical reasoning show that VCM consistently reduces the likelihood trap, improving diversity, coherence, and reasoning accuracy with minimal computational cost.
By Yuanhao Ding, Meimingwei Li, Esteban Garces Arias, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang
arXiv:2601. 02023v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly utilize massive context windows as working memory for autonomous tasks, their reliability fluctuates significantly depending on how information is distributed in real-world corpora.
By Amirali Ebrahimzadeh, Seyyed M. Salili
arXiv:2608. 07525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), severely limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications.
By Pengfei Zhou, Jiajun Song, Zhiwei Tang, Yixing Ma, Xiaopeng Peng, Donghui Si, Yuhang Xu, Huiqi Song, Yiyuan Miao, Yichen Qian, Weihua Chen, Wangbo Zhao, Bohan Zhuang, Jiasheng Tang, Yang You
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:2606. 03618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-assisted coding agents are bottlenecked by input-token cost.
By Mehmet Utku Colak