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arXiv Computation and Language By Kaijie Mo, Thomas Yang, Chantal Shaib, Qing Yao, William Rudman, Ramez Kouzy, Kanishka Misra, Byron C. Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li

What's in a Name? Morphological Shortcuts by LLMs in Pharmacology

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The study investigates how large language models (LLMs) use morphological affixes to infer drug properties, revealing that models often rely on affix cues rather than full drug names. By testing fictitious drug names constructed from real affixes, the authors demonstrate that affix signals alone can trigger class-level pharmacological responses. Their framework, applied to 653 drugs, shows that LLMs frequently derive drug semantics from affixes, sometimes misattributing properties among drugs sharing the same affix, and that this behavior is localized to early-mid network layers.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

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