ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has neglected instances-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates and comprehends prompt sensitivity in large language models. |
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POSIX: A Prompt Sensitivity Index For Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are sensitive to minor variations in prompts, such as spelling errors, alteration of wording or the prompt template. |
| Approach: | They propose a PrOmpt Sensitivity IndeX to measure prompt sensitivity . they use this to compare prompt sensitability of various open source LLMs . |
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What Did I Do Wrong? Quantifying LLMs’ Sensitivity and Consistency to Prompt Engineering (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose two metrics for classification tasks, namely *sensitivity* and *consistency*, which are complementary to task performance. |
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Flaw or Artifact? Rethinking Prompt Sensitivity in Evaluating LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a high prompt sensitivity has been widely accepted as a core limitation of large language models . a recent study suggests that prompt senescence may be an artifact of evaluation processes . |
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Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt sensitivity is a measure of how strongly the output of a large language model (LLM) depends on the exact wording of its input prompt. |
| Approach: | They consider LLMs as multivariate functions and perform a first-order Taylor expansion to analyze the relationship between meaning-preserving prompts, their gradients, and log probabilities of the model’s next token. |
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PromptPrism: A Linguistically-Inspired Taxonomy for Prompts (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | PromptPrism is a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels: functional structure, semantic component, and syntactic pattern. |
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Beyond Prompt Engineering: A Systematic Analysis of Prompt Lexical Sensitivity and Its Impacts on Quality (2026.findings-acl)
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Qipeng Xie, Zi Liang, Jiafei Wu, Yufei Chen, Weizheng Wang, Wenao Ma, Zhong Ming, Haiqin Yang, Kaishun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on prompt engineering have focused on optimizing models for performance under stylistic perturbations. |
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Exploring the Sensitivity of LLMs’ Decision-Making Capabilities: Insights from Prompt Variations and Hyperparameters (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have compared the decision-making abilities of large language models with those of humans from a psychological perspective. |
| Approach: | They examine LLMs' performance on the Horizon decision-making task studied by Binz and Schulz (2023) they observe that the decision- making abilities fluctuate based on input prompts and temperature settings. |
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Prompting the Unknown: Understanding Response Uncertainty in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are widely used in decision-making across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-response concept model that explains the relationship between the amount of task-relevant information provided in the prompt and the LLM-generated response uncertainty by identifying four sources of response uncertainty. |
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When Punctuation Matters: A Large-Scale Comparison of Prompt Robustness Methods for LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are sensitive to subtle, non-semantic variations in prompt phrasing and formatting. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate 4 methods for improving prompt robustness within a unified experimental framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are compared to 8 models from Llama, Qwen and Gemma families and are generalized against multiple types of distribution shifts. |
You don’t need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments (2024.naacl-long)
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Bangzhao Shu, Lechen Zhang, Minje Choi, Lavinia Dunagan, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, Dallas Card, David Jurgens
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are popular for research in social sciences . currently, prompting LLMs is insufficient to accurately and reliably capture model perceptions, and we discuss potential alternatives to improve this. |
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