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Related papers: Prompts have evil twins

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It has been widely observed that language models (LMs) respond in predictable ways to algorithmically generated prompts that are seemingly unintelligible. This is both a sign that we lack a full understanding of how LMs work, and a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Nathanaël Carraz Rakotonirina , Corentin Kervadec , Francesca Franzon , Marco Baroni

We explore the use of natural language prompts for controlling various aspects of the outputs generated by machine translation models. We demonstrate that natural language prompts allow us to influence properties like formality or specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Xavier Garcia , Orhan Firat

This research explores how the information of prompts interacts with the high-performing speech recognition model, Whisper. We compare its performances when prompted by prompts with correct information and those corrupted with incorrect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Chih-Kai Yang , Kuan-Po Huang , Hung-yi Lee

Writing effective prompts for large language models (LLM) can be unintuitive and burdensome. In response, services that optimize or suggest prompts have emerged. While such services can reduce user effort, they also introduce a risk: the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Weiran Lin , Anna Gerchanovsky , Omer Akgul , Lujo Bauer , Matt Fredrikson , Zifan Wang

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such "hallucinations" persist even in state-of-the-art systems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Adam Tauman Kalai , Ofir Nachum , Santosh S. Vempala , Edwin Zhang

Detecting ambiguity is important for language understanding, including uncertainty estimation, humour detection, and processing garden path sentences. We assess language models' sensitivity to ambiguity by introducing an adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Antonia Karamolegkou , Oliver Eberle , Phillip Rust , Carina Kauf , Anders Søgaard

Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of zero- and few-shot learning problems. However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens or how to pick the best…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Hila Gonen , Srini Iyer , Terra Blevins , Noah A. Smith , Luke Zettlemoyer

Large language models are highly sensitive to prompts, but this sensitivity is usually studied through task-relevant instructions, demonstrations, or reasoning cues. In this paper, we study a different form of prompt sensitivity: whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Pawel Batorski , Abtin Pourhadi , Jerzy Sarosiek , Przemyslaw Spurek , Paul Swoboda

Prompts have been the center of progress in advancing language models' zero-shot and few-shot performance. However, recent work finds that models can perform surprisingly well when given intentionally irrelevant or misleading prompts. Such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Albert Webson , Alyssa Marie Loo , Qinan Yu , Ellie Pavlick

Frontier models can be prompted or conditioned to do many tasks, but finding good prompts is not always easy, nor is understanding some performant prompts. We view prompting as finding the best conditioning sequence on a near-optimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Li Kevin Wenliang , Anian Ruoss , Jordi Grau-Moya , Marcus Hutter , Tim Genewein

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been observed to process non-human-readable text sequences, such as jailbreak prompts, often viewed as a bug for aligned LLMs. In this work, we present a systematic investigation challenging this…

Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-11 James A. Michaelov , Benjamin K. Bergen

Language model prompt optimization research has shown that semantically and grammatically well-formed manually crafted prompts are routinely outperformed by automatically generated token sequences with no apparent meaning or syntactic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Corentin Kervadec , Francesca Franzon , Marco Baroni

Are large language models (LLMs) sensitive to the distinction between humanly possible and impossible languages? This question was recently used in a broader debate on whether LLMs and humans share the same innate learning biases. Previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Imry Ziv , Nur Lan , Emmanuel Chemla

Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-3.5, LLaMA, and PaLM, seem to be knowledgeable and able to adapt to many tasks. However, we still cannot completely trust their answers, since LLMs suffer from \textbf{hallucination}\textemdash…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jia-Yu Yao , Kun-Peng Ning , Zhen-Hui Liu , Mu-Nan Ning , Yu-Yang Liu , Li Yuan

In this project, we want to explore the newly emerging field of prompt engineering and apply it to the downstream task of detecting LM biases. More concretely, we explore how to design prompts that can indicate 4 different types of biases:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Md Abdul Aowal , Maliha T Islam , Priyanka Mary Mammen , Sandesh Shetty

Modern language models can imitate complex patterns through few-shot learning, enabling them to complete challenging tasks without fine-tuning. However, imitation can also lead models to reproduce inaccuracies or harmful content if present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Danny Halawi , Jean-Stanislas Denain , Jacob Steinhardt

One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the…

Recently, a boom of papers has shown extraordinary progress in zero-shot and few-shot learning with various prompt-based models. It is commonly argued that prompts help models to learn faster in the same way that humans learn faster when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Albert Webson , Ellie Pavlick

Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Tianyang Xu , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Yohei Oseki , Ryan Cotterell , Alex Warstadt
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