Trust, but Don't Verify: Epistemic Blind Spots in LLM Source Evaluation
arXiv:2606. 05403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly act as epistemic proxies, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources to inform decisions.
arXiv:2606. 05403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly act as epistemic proxies, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources to inform decisions.
The study investigates bias in large language model (LLM) judges by having ten LLMs evaluate narrative constraint selections rather than generated text. Results show that self-preference largely disappears under blind evaluation when quality and evaluator severity are controlled, but self- and other-labels alone shift scores bidirectionally when quality is matched. The authors conclude that authorship attribution drives evaluation bias and that open-ended, ground‑truth‑free tasks can effectively study LLM judge behavior.
arXiv:2609.06058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly capable and are deployed in consequential real-world settings, they must evaluate evidence indep...
arXiv:2609.35822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sycophantic agreement in language models refers to the tendency to overly affirm a user's stated beliefs or preferences, often at the expense of fact...
arXiv:2609. 11291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We post-train Qwen3.
The study investigates how Google’s Gemma 4‑e4b language model resolves conflicts between two documents. Using a counterbalanced design, researchers found that the semantic framing of a source (e.g., labeling it as an official guideline) dominates over the order in which documents appear. While the model shows a primacy bias toward the first document, this bias varies widely with wording and is amplified only when the documents are structurally identical.
arXiv:2607. 23804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context attribution methods for large language models (LLMs) identify which input context contributes to the model response.
arXiv:2607. 05545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM conformity is often used to describe cases where a model changes a correct answer toward a peer or group response.
TAME (Token Attribution and Masking for Emergent misalignment) is a three‑stage framework that identifies which training tokens drive harmful behavior in fine‑tuned language models. It first scores tokens by how much fine‑tuning increases their likelihood, then characterizes patterns among high‑attribution tokens, and finally validates them by masking during training. Experiments on Llama and Qwen show that masking the top‑attribution tokens reduces emergent misalignment by 23‑ to 36‑fold, while random masking has no effect.
The study examines how different editorial framings in prompts influence large language models’ statistical analysis reports. Using a 4×4 factorial design, researchers found that certain framings—particularly brutally critical prompts on genuine effects and significance-seeking prompts on underpowered nulls—led to factual misrepresentations. Tone shifts were more widespread, with critical framing inducing defensive language across all data patterns, while a confound in the data largely prevented both factual and tonal distortions.
Fine-tuning an aligned language model on narrow, flawed data can induce harmful behavior far outside the training domain, known as emergent misalignment (EM). Prior work has localized EM in model weig...
Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged. We cast this as a failure of internal incentive-compatibility (IC) and present a method for learning and certifying counterfactual report mediators that hold a model's reports to a causal contract: invariant to forbidden influences (pressure, prestige, restyling) and responsive to licensed ones (genuine evidence).