6 papers
The Story Shapes the Agent: Narrative Priors in LLM Behavior
Yixuan Wang, James Lester, Shashank Srivastava
Persona prompting is widely used to steer LLM agent behavior, yet the narrative framing of a task can matter more than the assigned persona. We isolate this effect through structur…
The Point of No Return: Counterfactual Localization of Deceptive Commitment in Language-Model Reasoning
Scott Merrill, Shashank Srivastava
Existing deception datasets label completed outputs as honest or deceptive, treating deception as a property of the final response rather than a function of the model's reasoning t…
Socratic Students: Teaching Language Models to Learn by Asking Questions
Rajeev Bhatt Ambati, Tianyi Niu, Aashu Singh +3
Large language Models (LLMs) are usually used to answer questions, but many high-stakes applications (e.g., tutoring, clinical support) require the complementary skill of asking qu…
Adversarially Probing Cross-Family Sound Symbolism in 27 Languages
Anika Sharma, Tianyi Niu, Emma Wrenn +1
The phenomenon of sound symbolism, the non-arbitrary mapping between word sounds and meanings, has long been demonstrated through anecdotal experiments like Bouba Kiki, but rarely…
Classifying Unreliable Narrators with Large Language Models
Anneliese Brei, Katharine Henry, Abhisheik Sharma +2
Often when we interact with a first-person account of events, we consider whether or not the narrator, the primary speaker of the text, is reliable. In this paper, we propose using…
MarginSel : Max-Margin Demonstration Selection for LLMs
Rajeev Bhatt Ambati, James Lester, Shashank Srivastava +1
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at few-shot learning via in-context learning (ICL). However, the effectiveness of ICL is often sensitive to the selection and ordering of demonst…