arXiv:2608.29257v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are a standard format for evaluating large language models (LLMs), yet the popularity of answer options can confound e...
By Abdelrahman Abdallah, Mohammed Ali, Bhawna Piryani, Mahmoud Abdalla, Adam Jatowt
arXiv:2607.14109v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central...
By Inder Preet, Shuxin Lin, Dhaval Patel
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
The paper investigates why large reasoning models (LRMs) often continue to think even when prompted to stop, a phenomenon called "Still-thinking". By examining confidence at the thinking-termination boundary, internal attention divergences, and attention allocation across prompt segments, the authors find that high perplexity and greater attention to the original question correlate with continued thinking. They propose an attention‑intervention method that suppresses explicit reasoning, which reduces inefficiency but also lowers accuracy, underscoring a trade‑off between instruction compliance, inference speed, and correctness.
By Rongzhi Zhu, Yi Liu, Jiancheng Wang, Xiangyu Liu, Zequn Sun, Yiwei Wang, Yu Deng, Zijian Zhou, Wei Hu
arXiv:2608. 15065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models produce diverse, sometimes inconsistent answers across repeated queries on the same problem, so multi-sample inference is a prerequisite for reliable deployment.
By Chanhee Park, Sungbin Han, Jeongho Yoon, Seongtae Hong, Heuiseok Lim
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) generate distractor answers for multiple‑choice questions (MCQs) by modeling student misconceptions. It introduces a learning‑science‑based taxonomy of reasoning strategies and applies it to LLM‑generated reasoning traces in math and science MCQs. The study finds that in math, LLMs often follow a misconception‑based process that can be diagnostically useful, whereas in science they rely more on semantic similarity, with frequent failures when the model cannot produce a correct solution or discards plausible distractors. Providing the correct solution in the prompt improves alignment with human distractors by 6.4%.
"whyItMatters":"The findings show that anchoring distractor generation to the correct solution enhances LLM alignment with human‑authored distractors, underscoring the importance of correct‑answer cues in educational AI."
By Yanick Zengaffinen, Andreas Opedal, Donya Rooein, Kv Aditya Srivatsa, Shashank Sonkar, Mrinmaya Sachan