arXiv AI

Don't Ask: Understanding What Numeric Self-Reports Measure in Language Models

arXiv AI
Aug 14

Self-Referential Induction Increases Response Instability Relative to Unresolvable and Verifiable Questions in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 13258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-referential prompting has been shown to reliably induce large language models to produce first-person reports resembling subjective experience, but no prior work measures how consistent these reports are across repeated, independent trials, or how that consistency compares to the model's behavior on other kinds of open-ended questions.

By Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda
arXiv AI
3d ago

Change the Number, Change the Answer: Assessing Rating Scale Sensitivity in LLM-Based Text Scoring

The study investigates how different rating scale designs affect scores produced by large language models (LLMs) in text scoring tasks. By varying format, range, and sign across tasks like political leaning, sentiment, and toxicity, the authors find that a single design change can shift normalized scores by about 0.10 and alter the category of roughly 20% of texts. The research highlights that rubric-based prompting does not mitigate this sensitivity and emphasizes the need for robustness checks when using LLMs for scalar scoring.

By Wonjeong Jo, Gyuwan Kim, Ming Shan Hee
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Knowing When Not to Answer: Cross-Domain and Multi-Turn Generalization of Latent Underspecification Signals

The paper presents a new multi‑turn benchmark of 423 conversations with 1,661 labeled turn‑states to study when language models should refrain from answering. It shows that probes for unanswerability transfer well across datasets that share the same underlying signal, but fail to generalise to other forms of epistemic uncertainty. While a calibrated probe can identify underspecified turns more accurately than chance, it does not consistently improve overall generation quality compared to standard methods.

By Jerzy Kami\'nski, Ilya Galyukshev, Artem Kuznetsov, Danil Fedorov, Kirill Redko, Sergey Chuprin, Aidar Shumbalov, Stanislav Chumakov, Anna Kalyuzhnaya
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 14

A Probe Direction Is a Property of Its Prompt

arXiv:2608. 13329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model that behaves differently when it senses it is being tested would undermine the evaluations we rely on, so recent work has sought to read that sense directly from a model's activations.

By Valentin No\"el
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

How You Ask Shapes What You Get: A Theory-Seeded Measurement of Articulation in Advice-Seeking LLM Conversations

The paper investigates how the way users phrase advice‑seeking requests—termed articulation—creates stable, measurable patterns distinct from the topics of the requests. By analyzing 16,447 prompts from public chat corpora, the authors identify a small set of latent articulation factors that consistently appear across datasets and splits. One key finding is a long‑form, information‑poor style that leads language models to give shorter, vaguer answers without seeking clarification, a pattern that persists across topics and prompt lengths.

By Juneha Baek, Suhyeon Lee, Donghyuk Shin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Strangers to Themselves: What Language Models Say About Themselves Is Generic

The study examines whether language models can accurately predict their own behavior by comparing self-reports to actual performance across nine behavioral tests. Results show that direct self-report is weak and only modestly improved when the model sees the exact items, while generic questions about AI agents yield similar predictive power. First-person framing biases reports toward underestimating harmful behavior, and fine‑tuning on a model’s own record improves narrow predictions but does not generalize.

By Phil Blandfort, Urja Pawar
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Rating the Raters: Rasch Measurement Theory for LLM Evaluation

The paper discusses how large language models (LLMs) are used in various evaluation roles—examining benchmarks, judging other models, and rating human content—and frames each as a measurement problem. It proposes using Rasch measurement theory (RMT) to decompose ordinal ratings into distinct facets on a common scale, offering diagnostics for miscalibration and rater bias. A case study applying RMT to the Measuring Hate Speech corpus reveals systematic differences between LLMs and human raters in severity, calibration, robustness, sensitivity, and scale use, suggesting RMT should be part of the evaluation toolkit for LLMs in all roles.

By Pratik S. Sachdeva, Nathan Boudol