arXiv AI
4d ago

Prompt Lottery in LLM-as-a-Judge: Measuring and Mitigating Sensitivity to Syntactic Rephrasing

The paper introduces the "Prompt Lottery" phenomenon, where paraphrastic rephrasings of judge prompts in LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaJ) lead to inconsistent judgments and can even reverse model rankings. A large-scale study across various tasks, judge families, and model backbones demonstrates that these prompt variations significantly alter evaluation outcomes. A user study shows that LLMaJ judges are 6–9 times more sensitive to prompt rephrasings than humans, and that aggregating multiple prompts improves robustness by focusing on consistent judgments.

By Ilija Subasic, Brett Levert, Andrew Rabinovich, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Zhao Chen
arXiv AI
Oct 27

Large Language Models: A Plain-Language Overview for Engineers

Large Language Models: A Plain-Language Overview for Engineers explains that LLMs are neural networks trained on vast text collections to predict subsequent words, and outlines key concepts such as Transformers, pre‑training, fine‑tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, retrieval‑augmented generation, chain‑of‑thought prompting, and tool‑using agents. It also discusses efficiency techniques like FlashAttention and QLoRA, provides a life‑cycle figure and comparative tables, and offers a checklist for evaluating LLM claims, including checks for data contamination, model‑based grading, long‑context handling, and hallucination. The article aims to give engineers a clear picture of how training changes and prompts affect generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

By Bahaeddin T\"urko\u{g}lu
arXiv AI
4d ago

Prompt-agnostic Language Models

The paper introduces Prompt-agnostic Language Models, focusing on train‑time techniques to embed prompt robustness during instruction tuning. It shows that mixing paraphrases in training causes significant gradient interference—57% of per‑paraphrasing gradients conflict—leading to the development of two gradient‑merging methods, Prompt‑TIES and Prompt‑DARE, which resolve this interference. Experiments across four models demonstrate that these methods substantially reduce per‑example variance and improve local robustness with minimal impact on overall accuracy.

By Frederic Sadrieh