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Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

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Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#51

I've done experiments and basically what I found was that LLM models are extremely sensitive to .....language. Well, duh but let me explain a bit. They will give a different quality/accuracy of answer depending on the system prompt order, language use, length, how detailed the examples are, etc... basically every variable you can think of is responsible for either improving or causing detrimental behavior in the outp…

I thought embeddings were the internal representation? Does reasoning and thinking get expanded back out into tokens and fed back in as the next prompt for reasoning? Or does the model internally churn on chains of embeddings?

There's a certain one-to-oneness between tokens and embeddings. A token expands into a large amount of state, and processing happens on that state and nothing else.

The point is that there isn't any additional state or reasoning. You have a bunch of things equivalent to tokens, and the only trained operations deal with sequences of those things. Calling them "tokens" is a reasonable linguistic choice, since the exact representation of a token isn't core to the argument being made.

Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#52
post #5

I’d argue real judges are unreliable as well. The real question for me is: are they less reliable than human judges? Probably yes. But I favor a relative measurement to humans than a plain statement like that.

I know the answer and I hate it.

AIs are inferior to humans at their best, but superior to humans as they actually behave in society, due to decision fatigue and other constraints. When it comes to moral judgment in high stakes scenarios, AIs still fail (or can be made to fail) in ways that are not socially acceptable.

Compare an AI to a real-world, overworked corporate decision maker, though, and you'll find that the AI is kinder and less biased. It still sucks, because GI/GO, but it's slightly better, simply because it doesn't suffer emotional fatigue, doesn't take as many shortcuts, and isn't clouded by personal opinions since it's not a person.

Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#53
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, LLMs tell you "what you want to hear." I can usually predict the response I'll get based on how I phrase the question.

I feel like LLMs have a bit of the Clever Hans effect. It takes a lot of my cues as to what it thinks I want it to say or opinion it thinks I want it to have. Clever Hans was a horse who people thought could do maths by tapping his hoof. But actually he was just reading the body language of the person asking the question. Noticing them tense up as he got to the right number of stamps and stopping - still pretty smart…

What's worse is that it can sometimes (but not always) read through your anti-bias prompts.

    "No, I want your honest opinion." "It's awesome."
    "I'm going to invest $250,000 into this. Tell me what you really think." "You should do it."

    (New Session)

    "Someone pitched to me the idea that..." "Reject it."

Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#54

I've done experiments and basically what I found was that LLM models are extremely sensitive to .....language. Well, duh but let me explain a bit. They will give a different quality/accuracy of answer depending on the system prompt order, language use, length, how detailed the examples are, etc... basically every variable you can think of is responsible for either improving or causing detrimental behavior in the outp…

I somewhat agree, but I think that the language example is not a good one. As Anthropic have demonstrated[0], LLMs do have "conceptual neurons" that generalise an abstract concept which can later be translated to other languages.

The issue is that those concepts are encoded in intermediate layers during training, absorbing biases present in training data. It may produce a world model good enough to know that "green" and "verde" are different names for the same thing, but not robust enough to discard ordering bias or wording bias. Humans suffer from that too, albeit arguably less.

[0] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#56

I've done experiments and basically what I found was that LLM models are extremely sensitive to .....language. Well, duh but let me explain a bit. They will give a different quality/accuracy of answer depending on the system prompt order, language use, length, how detailed the examples are, etc... basically every variable you can think of is responsible for either improving or causing detrimental behavior in the outp…

This doesn't match Anthropics research on the subject

> Claude sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal “language of thought.” We show this by translating simple sentences into multiple languages and tracing the overlap in how Claude processes them.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#57

I've done experiments and basically what I found was that LLM models are extremely sensitive to .....language. Well, duh but let me explain a bit. They will give a different quality/accuracy of answer depending on the system prompt order, language use, length, how detailed the examples are, etc... basically every variable you can think of is responsible for either improving or causing detrimental behavior in the outp…

I somewhat agree, but I think that the language example is not a good one. As Anthropic have demonstrated[0], LLMs do have "conceptual neurons" that generalise an abstract concept which can later be translated to other languages. The issue is that those concepts are encoded in intermediate layers during training, absorbing biases present in training data. It may produce a world model good enough to know that "green"…

I have learned to take these kinds of papers with a grain of salt, though. They often rest on carefully selected examples that make the behavior seem much more consistent and reliable than it is. For example, the famous "king - man + woman = queen" example from Word2Vec is in some ways more misleading than helpful, because while it worked fine for that case it doesn't necessarily work nearly so well for [emperor, man, woman, empress] or [husband, man, woman, wife].

You get a similar thing with convolutional neural networks. Sometimes they automatically learn image features in a way that yields hidden layers that easy and intuitive to interpret. But not every time. A lot of the time you get a seemingly random garble that belies any parsimonious interpretation.

This Anthropic paper is at least kind enough to acknowledge this fact when they poke at the level of representation sharing and find that, according to their metrics, peak feature-sharing among languages is only about 30% for English and French, two languages that are very closely aligned. Also note that this was done using two cherry-picked languages and a training set that was generated by starting with an English language corpus and then translating it using a different language model. It's entirely plausible that the level of feature-sharing would not be nearly so great if they had used human-generated translations. (edit: Or a more realistic training corpus that doesn't entirely consist of matched translations of very short snippets of text.)

Just to throw even more cold water on it, this also doesn't necessarily mean that the models are building a true semantic model and not just finding correlations upon which humans impose semantic interpretations. This general kind of behavior when training models on cross-lingual corpora generated using direct translations was first observed in the 1990s, and the model in question was singular value decomposition.

Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#58

LLMs are good at discovery, since they know a lot, and can retrieve that knowledge from a query that simpler (e.g. regex-based) search engines with the same knowledge couldn't. For example, an LLM that is input a case may discover an obscure law, or notice a pattern in past court cases which establishes precedent. So they can be helpful to a real judge. Of course, the judge must check that the law or precedent aren't…

I would add that "hallucinations" aren't even the only failure mode a LLM can have, it can partially or completely miss what its supposed to find in the discovery process and lead you to believe that there just isn't anything worth pursuing in that particular venue.

Re: Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

#60

I've done experiments and basically what I found was that LLM models are extremely sensitive to .....language. Well, duh but let me explain a bit. They will give a different quality/accuracy of answer depending on the system prompt order, language use, length, how detailed the examples are, etc... basically every variable you can think of is responsible for either improving or causing detrimental behavior in the outp…

Once can see that very easily in image generation models.

The "Elephant" it generates is lot different from "Haathi" (Hindi/Urdu). Same goes for other concepts that have 1-to-1 translation but the results are different.

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