The study investigates how different prompt components affect language model responses in psychometric tests. By crossing five distinct baseline personas with five variants of each prompt element—persona wording, task instruction, item wording, and option symbol—the authors measure response shifts using the 1‑Wasserstein distance. Their analysis of 13 small open‑weight language models on the Big Five Inventory and Short Dark Triad reveals that task instruction and option symbol changes often cause more variation than paraphrasing the persona or item, with prompt artifacts explaining over 50% of the variation for many items.
By Nils Schwager, Christoph Hau, Simon M\"unker, Achim Rettinger
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
Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment.
arXiv:2607. 24999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM cognitive scores are increasingly summarized as per-ability profiles whose dimensions should converge across tasks, respond selectively to matched interventions, and generalize beyond the models used to define them.
By Dengzhe Hou, Lingyu Jiang, Fangzhou Lin, Kazunori D Yamada
arXiv:2609.22119v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Evaluation awareness poses an unprecedented threat to model evaluation, but the mechanisms by which models detect it remain unknown. This study focus...
By Navraj Singh, Maheep Chaudhary
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:2607. 13162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What a language model will and will not do is largely set during post-training, but which behaviors it expresses, hides, or resists is not revealed by prompting alone.
By Winston Zeng, Ali Emami, Jinho Choi
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) possess intrinsic value systems and how to quantify and align them. By projecting responses from 106 LLMs and 95,000 human survey profiles into a shared sociological space, the authors confirm that LLMs do have values, though these values form a concentrated, idealized core rather than mirroring human diversity. They introduce the Prior-Environment-Cognition (PEC) framework to mathematically define value expression and propose an adaptive Alignment Prescription that identifies minimal interventions—ranging from prompts to targeted parameter updates—to steer LLM values efficiently without harming general performance.
By Keqing Zhang, Jingyu Chen, Yufan Liu, Yongqiang Zhu, Nai Ding, Lai Jiang, Congyan Lang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
arXiv:2608. 10385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as relevance assessors in information retrieval (IR) evaluation, raising questions about how assessor framing affects judgment reliability and downstream system comparison.
By Samaneh Mohtadi, Pietro Bernardelle, Joel Mackenzie, Gianluca Demartini
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:2606. 03357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When prompting SLMs for psychometric assessments, researchers assume the outputs reflect semantic reasoning.
By Nils Schwager, Christoph Hau, Simon M\"unker, Achim Rettinger
arXiv:2607. 14109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central challenges in natural language understanding.
By Inder Preet, Shuxin Lin, Dhaval Patel