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Prompting serves as the major way humans interact with Large Language Models (LLM). Commercial AI systems commonly define the role of the LLM in system prompts. For example, ChatGPT uses ``You are a helpful assistant'' as part of its…

Recent studies demonstrate that prompting a role-playing persona to an LLM improves reasoning capability. However, assigning an adequate persona is difficult since LLMs are extremely sensitive to assigned prompts; thus, inaccurately defined…

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Large language models are increasingly used as behavioral simulators, but it remains unclear when their outputs reflect human-like cognitive mechanisms rather than prompt-sensitive surface patterns. We study this question through the…

System prompts in Large Language Models (LLMs) are predefined directives that guide model behaviour, taking precedence over user inputs in text processing and generation. LLM deployers increasingly use them to ensure consistent responses…

Modern large language models (LLMs) are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Unlike traditional learners, LLMs cannot use back-propagation to obtain feedback, and condition…

Persona prompting is widely used to steer large language models, yet its practical value remains unclear. Prior work often evaluates persona prompting using aggregate scores, making it difficult to determine whether expert-role prompting…

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…

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to $``$learn in context$"$ based on the provided prompt has led to an explosive growth in their use, culminating in the proliferation of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard. These AI…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, largely attributed to the intricate alignment process using human feedback. While alignment has become an essential training…

Prompt engineering has emerged as a powerful technique for guiding large language models (LLMs) toward desired responses, significantly enhancing their performance across diverse tasks. Beyond their role as static predictors, LLMs…

Recent interpretability work has identified model-internal handles on post-trained behavior, including refusal directions, assistant/persona axes, and sparse chat-tuning features. These results localize where behaviors can be read out or…

We study how well large language models (LLMs) explain their generations through rationales -- a set of tokens extracted from the input text that reflect the decision-making process of LLMs. Specifically, we systematically study rationales…

Using persona-conditioned LLMs as synthetic survey respondents has become a common practice in computational social science and agent-based simulations. Yet, it remains unclear whether multi-attribute persona prompting improves LLM…

Modern Language Models (LMs) owe much of their success to masked causal attention, the backbone of Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models. Although GPTs can process the entire user prompt at once, the causal masking is applied to…

Large language models (LLMs) can be said to have preferences: they reliably pick certain tasks and outputs over others, and preferences shaped by post-training and system prompts appear to shape much of their behaviour. But models can also…

As generative AI systems rapidly improve, a key question emerges: how do users adapt to these changes, and when does such adaptation matter for realizing performance gains? Drawing on theories of dynamic capabilities and IT complements, we…

Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g.,…

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…

Persona prompting is increasingly used in large language models (LLMs) to simulate views of various sociodemographic groups. However, how a persona prompt is formulated can significantly affect outcomes, raising concerns about the fidelity…