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
arXiv:2607. 28282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating the quality and relevance of textual outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging and resource-intensive.
By Bertil Braun, Martin Forell
arXiv:2510. 06732v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in information retrieval, yet their ranking behavior can be steered by small, natural-sounding prompts.
By Tiancheng Xing, Jerry Li, Yixuan Du, Xiyang Hu
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.
By Ruiyang Qin, Qingzhuo Wang, Tian Wang, Zhihua Wei, Wen Shen
The paper investigates how small lexical changes in prompts can cause large performance swings in large language models. Using a dataset of 132,000 prompt variants, the authors uncover a scaling law linking higher average task performance to lower variance and greater robustness. They identify domain-specific terminology and explicit action directives as key linguistic factors that stabilize prompts, and propose an automated Prompt-Refining Agent that reduces performance variance by 40.7% in code generation while maintaining or improving mean performance.
By Qipeng Xie, Zi Liang, Jiafei Wu, Yufei Chen, Weizheng Wang, Wenao Ma, Zhong Ming, Haiqin Yang, Kaishun Wu
arXiv:2602. 12424v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Benchmarks establish a standardized evaluation framework to systematically assess the performance of large language models (LLMs), facilitating objective comparisons and driving advancements in the field.
By Ziqian Zhang, Xingjian Hu, Yue Huang, Kai Zhang, Ruoxi Chen, Yixin Liu, Qingsong Wen, Kaidi Xu, Xiangliang Zhang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lichao Sun