arXiv Machine Learning

Mapping and Measuring the Behavioral Evolution of Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 11027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmark leaderboards summarize how well a language model performs, but not how its behavior relates to that of other models or changes across generations.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

The Rise of Verbal Tics in Large Language Models: A Systematic Analysis Across Frontier Models

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
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Toward Measuring Structural Drift in LLM Communication Loops

The paper introduces a new way to detect drift in stateful language‑model pipelines by treating the sequence of prompt, response, and next prompt as a single unit of analysis. It defines two metrics—communication closure and normalized conditional action contribution—to quantify how well a response aligns with the subsequent prompt and how much it resolves the next reply. Experiments on over 2,200 dialogues show that swapping a response drastically reduces measured contribution, indicating that drift can be detected without labels or predefined rules.

By Wael Hafez, Amir Nazeri, Chenan Wei
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Response drift across frontier large language models

arXiv:2607. 20454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: All frontier large language models (LLMs) exhibit response drift -- producing outputs that deviate from expert-validated references -- yet the magnitude and structure of this drift remain uncharacterised by systematic human evaluation.

By Mohammed Aledhari, Ali Aledhari, Fatimah Aledhari, Gowtham Venkat Eathamokkala, Mohamed Rahouti
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Evaluating and Explaining Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs Using Interactions

The paper introduces a fine-grained method called interactions to analyze prompt sensitivity in large language models (LLMs). By decomposing output scores into nonlinear interactions, the authors show that subtle prompt changes can destabilize these interactions even when overall outputs stay unchanged. They propose an Interaction-based Prompt Sensitivity (IPS) metric and use it to evaluate 50 open-source LLMs, finding that supervised fine‑tuning, larger model scales, dense architectures, and few‑shot learning all reduce prompt sensitivity, primarily by stabilizing low‑order interactions.

By Ruiyang Qin, Qingzhuo Wang, Tian Wang, Zhihua Wei, Wen Shen