Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much context a model can hold before recall and honesty degrade. We report two controlled experiments crossing all three factors on one held, contamination-free synthetic corpus (the "Book of Veyra," 8,780 uniquely-named entities, deterministically regenerable from a fixed seed), evaluated across five models.
arXiv:2603. 23530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks.
By Avni Mittal
arXiv:2608. 02665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A benchmark score is a measurement instrument, yet most benchmarks read each item at a single canonical surface form.
By Yongxi Zhou, Junwei Yao, Yuanzhe Liu, Zihan Dong, Wenbo Ye, Jiaxi Wen, Lai Yun Choi
arXiv:2608. 02639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production prompts rarely carry a single instruction.
By Atul Anand, Sourav Chattaraj
arXiv:2606. 05183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as high-stakes advisors, yet standard alignment benchmarks treat sycophancy as a binary failure mode.
By Patrick Keough
arXiv:2606. 25449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all.
By Alex Kwon
arXiv:2606. 28876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language models often conflate two different goals: compressing history into an efficient state, and maintaining reliable long-term memory.
By Junyi Zou, Avrova Donz
arXiv:2606. 04057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) now generate substantial production code, often for tasks with multiple valid algorithmic solutions.
By Akanksha Narula, Mofasshara Binte Rafique, Laurent Bindschaedler
Accuracy changes after language-model self-revision are usually interpreted as changes in reasoning. We show this can fail at the answer-extraction boundary, and test the failure causally rather than only observationally.
arXiv:2601. 02023v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly utilize massive context windows as working memory for autonomous tasks, their reliability fluctuates significantly depending on how information is distributed in real-world corpora.
By Amirali Ebrahimzadeh, Seyyed M. Salili
arXiv:2606. 25097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates inference by letting a draft model propose tokens for a target model to verify, raising a concrete safety question: at temperature zero, can draft-side behavior leak into safety-scored outputs?
By Sahil Kadadekar
arXiv:2607. 20433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While language models remain frozen at their training state, the world evolves continuously.
By Jea Kwon, Jiwon Kim, Dong-kyum Kim, Meeyoung Cha