arXiv Computation and Language

Large Language Models Systematically Favor Popular Options: Evidence and Mitigation Across MCQs

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Large Language Model Selection with Limited Annotations

arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...

By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Deep and shallow biases in language models

The paper introduces a bias depth score to differentiate between stable model preferences (Deep biases) and prompt‑dependent responses (Shallow biases) in large language models. By analyzing 4,442 opinion prompts across four models, it finds that only about a quarter of concentrated preferences persist after scenario reframing, indicating that most are shallow. The study shows Deep biases are more often inherited from pretraining and harder to remove through fine‑tuning or prompt‑based debiasing, highlighting the need to distinguish learned biases from prompt artifacts.

By An Vo, Vy Tuong Dang, Khai-Nguyen Nguyen, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Thamar Solorio, Anh Totti Nguyen, Daeyoung Kim
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 15

Frustratingly Easy Majority Voting Using Length Conditioning

The paper introduces Length‑Conditioned Majority Voting (LCMV), a test‑time training method that enhances the standard Majority Voting (MV) technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). LCMV incorporates an empirical bias that longer Chain‑of‑Thoughts (CoTs) are less likely to be correct by modeling a length‑conditioned prior with a logistic function. This prior is adapted on unlabeled test data without fine‑tuning the LLM, and the resulting weighted votes consistently outperform standard MV and other length‑ or confidence‑based aggregation strategies across multiple reasoning benchmarks.

By Fiorenzo Parascandolo, Enver Sangineto, Xiaoyi Yu, Wenhui Tan, Jipei He, Ruihua Song, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Unexplored flaws in multiple-choice VQA make benchmarking unreliable

The paper demonstrates that multiple‑choice visual question answering (MC‑VQA) benchmarks are unreliable because model performance is highly sensitive to semantically neutral prompt formatting choices—such as option ID sets, delimiters, and separators—despite protocols that mitigate option‑order effects. Across seven multimodal large language models and five datasets, the authors observed frequent rank reversals when systematically varying 48 equivalent prompt formats, attributing the instability to tokenizer‑induced token fusion or removal and to how option ID sets influence attention patterns. Consequently, MC‑VQA rankings correlate weakly with open‑ended evaluation, revealing that MC‑VQA reflects option‑selection dynamics as well as multimodal reasoning.

By Fabio Rosenthal, Sebastian Schmidt, Thorsten Graf, Thorsten Bagdonat, Stephan G\"unnemann, Leo Schwinn