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

Evaluating and Explaining Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs Using Interactions

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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.

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