Large Language Models Systematically Favor Popular Options: Evidence and Mitigation Across MCQs
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2608. 11947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiple-choice benchmarks are widely used to evaluate large language models, but MCQ scores conflate knowledge with sensitivity to option order, which makes them unreliable measures of model knowledge.
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.
arXiv:2606.16011v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard accuracy benchmarks evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) reach correct answers. However, they do not test whether models maintain...
arXiv:2604. 04944v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used to evaluate large language models (LLMs).
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.
arXiv:2511.22341v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Previous works identify sensitivity to option order as a key issue in multiple-choice VQA (MC-VQA) evaluation and propose protocols to mitiga...