arXiv:2607. 18476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model must choose one answer from a large space of equally valid options, a format clause -- "Reply with JSON only" -- changes which answer it chooses.
Summary generated by The Flow from the publisher's feed. The full article lives at arXiv AI.
arXiv:2606. 24083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: "Talk short.
arXiv:2607. 12796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model must pick one answer from a large space of equally valid options, which does it pick -- and how often is it the same answer every other model picks?
arXiv:2607. 20492v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models in production do not write prose.
arXiv:2607. 19257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much context a model can hold before recall and honesty degrade.
When a language model must pick one answer from a large space of equally valid options, which does it pick -- and how often is it the same answer every other model picks? Asked to "pick a word -- any word," 44 models chose "serendipity" 41% of the time.
arXiv:2606. 09410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work treats structured output as a reasoning tax, but this framing is incomplete: the cost of formatting depends strongly on a model's spare capacity.