arXiv AI By Nils Schwager, Christoph Hau, Simon M\"unker, Achim Rettinger

The Unsampled Truth: Psychometrics in SLMs Measure Prompt Artifacts, Not Psychological Constructs

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arXiv:2606. 03357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When prompting SLMs for psychometric assessments, researchers assume the outputs reflect semantic reasoning.

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arXiv AI
Sep 1

The Unsampled Truth: Quantifying Prompt Artifacts in LM Psychometrics

The study investigates how different prompt components affect language model responses in psychometric tests. By crossing five distinct baseline personas with five variants of each prompt element—persona wording, task instruction, item wording, and option symbol—the authors measure response shifts using the 1‑Wasserstein distance. Their analysis of 13 small open‑weight language models on the Big Five Inventory and Short Dark Triad reveals that task instruction and option symbol changes often cause more variation than paraphrasing the persona or item, with prompt artifacts explaining over 50% of the variation for many items.

By Nils Schwager, Christoph Hau, Simon M\"unker, Achim Rettinger
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 14

A Probe Direction Is a Property of Its Prompt

arXiv:2608. 13329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model that behaves differently when it senses it is being tested would undermine the evaluations we rely on, so recent work has sought to read that sense directly from a model's activations.

By Valentin No\"el