arXiv Computation and Language

Does Reasoning Improve Psychological Depth in Large Language Models?

The study examined whether reasoning-enhanced large language models produce psychologically deeper short stories. Using 60 blinded pairwise evaluations, human annotators found no consistent advantage for reasoning-oriented models: GPT‑5 slightly outperformed GPT‑4o, while DeepSeek‑R1 lagged behind DeepSeek‑V3. In contrast, an LLM-as-a-Judge consistently favored reasoning models, revealing a strong pro‑reasoning bias that may mask reader subjectivity in creative tasks.

arXiv AI
Jul 10

Rethinking LLM-as-a-Judge: Representation-as-a-Judge with Small Language Models via Semantic Capacity Asymmetry

arXiv:2601. 22588v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as reference-free evaluators via prompting, but this "LLM-as-a-Judge" paradigm is costly, opaque, and sensitive to prompt design.

By Zhuochun Li, Yong Zhang, Ming Li, Yuelyu Ji, Yiming Zeng, Ning Cheng, Yun Zhu, Yanmeng Wang, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Daqing He
arXiv AI
Aug 17

The Metacognitive Bottleneck: Japanese Riddles Reveal Fundamental Limits of Machine Insight and Self-Evaluation in Reasoning AI

arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.

By Masaharu Mizumoto, Dat Nguyen, Zhiheng Han, Xingfu Li, Yo Nakawake, Le Minh Nguyen
arXiv AI
Oct 31

Prompt Lottery in LLM-as-a-Judge: Measuring and Mitigating Sensitivity to Syntactic Rephrasing

The paper introduces the "Prompt Lottery" phenomenon, where paraphrastic rephrasings of judge prompts in LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaJ) lead to inconsistent judgments and can even reverse model rankings. A large-scale study across various tasks, judge families, and model backbones demonstrates that these prompt variations significantly alter evaluation outcomes. A user study shows that LLMaJ judges are 6–9 times more sensitive to prompt rephrasings than humans, and that aggregating multiple prompts improves robustness by focusing on consistent judgments.

By Ilija Subasic, Brett Levert, Andrew Rabinovich, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Zhao Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Reason Wide, Not Deep: Amortizing the Reasoning Premium into Distilled Skills

arXiv:2608. 07885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning modes of language models outperform their non-reasoning counterparts on multi-step agentic tasks, but pay a 3-6x premium in output tokens on every episode -- much of it spent re-deriving procedures that are shared across episodes of the same domain.

By Agamdeep Singh, Srishti Gautam, Priyanshu Gupta, Nikita Mehrotra, Tanmay Bakshi, Sumit Gulwani