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The growing awareness of safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) has sparked considerable interest in the evaluation of safety. This study investigates an under-explored issue about the evaluation of LLMs, namely the substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yixu Wang , Yan Teng , Kexin Huang , Chengqi Lyu , Songyang Zhang , Wenwei Zhang , Xingjun Ma , Yu-Gang Jiang , Yu Qiao , Yingchun Wang

Large language models often struggle to recognize their knowledge limits in closed-book question answering, leading to confident hallucinations. While decomposed prompting is typically used to improve accuracy, we investigate its impact on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Dhruv Madhwal , Lyuxin David Zhang , Dan Roth , Tomer Wolfson , Vivek Gupta

Large language models are increasingly used for code generation, yet the correctness of their outputs depends not only on model capability but also on how tasks are specified. Prior studies demonstrate that small changes in natural language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Amal AKLI , Mike PAPADAKIS , Maxime CORDY , Yves Le TRAON

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

The output of large language models (LLMs) is unstable, due both to non-determinism of the decoding process as well as to prompt brittleness. While the intrinsic non-determinism of LLM generation may mimic existing uncertainty in human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Jiahui Li , Sean Papay , Roman Klinger

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they often refuse to answer legitimate queries--a phenomenon known as overrefusal. Overrefusal typically stems from over-conservative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Licheng Pan , Yongqi Tong , Xin Zhang , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Zhixuan Chu

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as reasoners and automated evaluators, yet they remain susceptible to cognitive biases -- often altering their reasoning when faced with spurious prompt-level cues such as consensus claims or…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Qian Wang , Xuandong Zhao , Zirui Zhang , Zhanzhi Lou , Nuo Chen , Dawn Song , Bingsheng He

There is an increasing interest in using language models (LMs) for automated decision-making, with multiple countries actively testing LMs to aid in military crisis decision-making. To scrutinize relying on LM decision-making in high-stakes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Aryan Shrivastava , Jessica Hullman , Max Lamparth

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

System prompt configuration can make the difference between near-total phishing blindness and near-perfect detection in LLM email agents. We present PhishNChips, a study of 11 models under 10 prompt strategies, showing that prompt-model…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Ron Litvak

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

This paper investigates how prompt engineering techniques impact both accuracy and confidence elicitation in Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to medical contexts. Using a stratified dataset of Persian board exam questions across…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Nariman Naderi , Zahra Atf , Peter R Lewis , Aref Mahjoub far , Seyed Amir Ahmad Safavi-Naini , Ali Soroush

Large Language Models like GPT-4 adjust their responses not only based on the question asked, but also on how it is emotionally phrased. We systematically vary the emotional tone of 156 prompts - spanning controversial and everyday topics -…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Franck Bardol

Large language Models (LLMs) are highly sensitive to variations in prompt formulation, which can significantly impact their ability to generate accurate responses. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Prompt Sensitivity Prediction, and a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amirhossein Razavi , Mina Soltangheis , Negar Arabzadeh , Sara Salamat , Morteza Zihayat , Ebrahim Bagheri

Prompt-based models have gathered a lot of attention from researchers due to their remarkable advancements in the fields of zero-shot and few-shot learning. Developing an effective prompt template plays a critical role. However, prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Junyu Mao , Stuart E. Middleton , Mahesan Niranjan

Interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) is primarily carried out via prompting. A prompt is a natural language instruction designed to elicit certain behaviour or output from a model. In theory, natural language prompts enable…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Michael Desmond , Michelle Brachman

Prompting is a common approach for leveraging LMs in zero-shot settings. However, the underlying mechanisms that enable LMs to perform diverse tasks without task-specific supervision remain poorly understood. Studying the relationship…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Cesar Gonzalez-Gutierrez , Dirk Hovy

Reward models are a key component of large language model alignment, serving as proxies for human preferences during training. However, existing evaluations focus primarily on broad instruction-following benchmarks, providing limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Gayane Ghazaryan , Esra Dönmez

GPT-3 can perform numerous tasks when provided a natural language prompt that contains a few training examples. We show that this type of few-shot learning can be unstable: the choice of prompt format, training examples, and even the order…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Tony Z. Zhao , Eric Wallace , Shi Feng , Dan Klein , Sameer Singh

Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce surprisingly sophisticated estimates of their own uncertainty. However, it remains unclear to what extent this expressed confidence is tied to the reasoning, knowledge, or decision making of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Jiawei Wang , Yanfei Zhou , Siddartha Devic , Deqing Fu