LLM Prompting

While Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich world knowledge and impressive generalization capabilities, their direct application to tabular data classification is hindered by high inference costs and limited interpretability. In contrast, decision trees are fast and transparent but often underperform in low-data regimes. In this work, we propose a novel framework that bridges these paradigms by distilling LLM knowledge into interpretable decision trees under a few-shot learning setting. Instead of directly prompting the LLM to generate full trees, which is often unstable and inefficient, we develop a three-stage paradigm that prompts the LLM to generate rules and organize the rules into a tree. Experiments on multiple real-world tabular datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and interpretability with significantly lower prompting overhead compared to existing baselines.

In this paper, we study how training data creates associations between the tokens at the start of a base model's response and the reasoning behavior that follows. First, we demonstrate that fixing particular starting token cues makes a base model's performance competitive with that of its reinforcement learning (RL)-trained counterparts on math and coding. For instance, the cue ".\n\nOkay" raises Olmo-3-7B's MATH-500 pass@1 accuracy from 42% to 78%, while "Alright," raises Qwen3-14B's from 72% to 87%. Second, RL makes these cues more likely, while fixing them recovers much of its performance gain over the base model. Third, we trace the reasoning effects of token cues to the training data. We perform causal data interventions to turn an arbitrary word, such as "chicken", into an effective reasoning cue, or remove an existing cue's effect. A similar edit makes the prompt instruction "Think duck duck goose" as effective as "Think step by step" at eliciting reasoning. We also find that the hidden state representations induced by different cues correlate with different document types from the training set. Finally, we extend our study of token cues with a case study in language model safety, finding that different cues elicit distinct refusal and compliance behaviors that correspond to different types of training data.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for literature search and synthesis. However, it is unclear whether they retrieve accurate bibliographic information in environmental science. Therefore, we quantitatively compared the errors of widely used LLM platforms in retrieving references related to original articles from five leading environmental science journals (Energy and Environmental Science, Nature Sustainability, Nature Climate Change, Lancet Planetary Health, and Environmental Science and Technology) published in 2024 to 2025. Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, and Gemini were used as the LLM platforms. LLMs retrieved 10 references for each of the 50 randomly selected original article using either the article's abstract or its full-text as prompt. The retrieved references were subject to a multimetric score ratio combining validity of bibliographic data, Google Scholar link, digital object identifier, Scopus Electronic Identifier and relevance score (cited by or being the index paper), and the proportion of complete fabrication that failed all metrics. Abstract-only prompt yielded significantly higher accuracy than full-text one. This advantage was confirmed in multilevel mixed-effect multivariable regression after adjusting for journal, platform, and output order. Source journal and the position of a reference within the output list were also independently associated with retrieval accuracy, with lower-listed references associated with lower accuracy. These findings suggest that LLM assisted literature retrieval in environmental science remains moderately accurate and overall inconsistent, varying significantly by platform, journal, prompt type, and output position. Abstract-based prompting, as task-aligned information compression, may outperform full-text one in literature retrieval. Caution should be used when generalizing our findings.

Role prompting elicits specialized behavior from large language models through an expert identity, offering a lightweight way to guide reasoning on demanding tasks. However, evaluating or distilling complete role-prompted answers can miss useful next-token preferences when the sampled solution remains incorrect. Transferring these preferences also requires an objective that reaches alternatives the student rarely predicts. We introduce OPSRD, which uses a fixed expert role as privileged teaching context for on-policy self-distillation without reference solutions. A role-free student generates a trajectory, and a frozen instance of the same base model supplies role-conditioned distributions on its exact prefixes, exposing alternatives beyond the sampled continuation. Teacher-weighted forward KL targets alternatives the student underestimates, with clipping to limit individual vocabulary contributions. Supervision is restricted to the highest-entropy half of student positions, concentrating learning where predictions are uncertain. Experiments on three competition-math benchmarks with Qwen3-1.7B, 4B, and 8B show improvements over the base models without role prompts at inference. Forward KL achieves the highest macro-averaged accuracy among the three evaluated divergences at every scale. Code is available at https://github.com/zhansan114514/OPSRD.

Turning decoder-only large language models (LLMs) into strong dense retrievers typically requires some form of retriever training. In this paper, we ask whether LLMs can instead be prompted to produce effective representations for dense retrieval given only a few in-context examples. To answer this, we introduce RICE (Representations from In-Context Examples), a simple "training-free" approach that extracts high-quality dense representations from LLMs. To do so, RICE conditions the LLM on examples that provide a shared context for query and document encoding. Our results demonstrate that RICE embeddings can substantially improve the accuracy of prompt-based LLM embeddings, establishing it as a simple method to build LLM-based dense retrievers that do not require training. We release our code at https://github.com/nourj98/RICE.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to enrich user queries in information retrieval (IR) so that a standard retriever such as BM25 can bridge vocabulary gaps with the target corpus. Any single LLM, however, is limited by its training data and architectural biases, and its enrichment behavior depends on hand-crafted prompts that must be re-engineered for each new model -- an expensive and poorly scalable process. We present MERGE (Multi-LLM Ensemble for Retrieval via Generative Enrichment), a two-stage framework: three heterogeneous 7-8B open-source LLMs independently produce candidate expansions, and a larger LLM generatively synthesizes them into a single query. To make prompt engineering scalable across the ensemble, we integrate a task-grounded Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) loop into both stages. Unlike APO methods that judge candidates with an LLM evaluator, our loop scores each candidate by its downstream retrieval performance and runs a small tournament between the current champion prompt and optimizer-proposed drafts, terminating once the champion survives two consecutive rounds; a history-augmented variant additionally feeds the recent tournament trajectory back to the optimizer. MERGE is retriever-agnostic and issues a single BM25 pass with no rank fusion, no supervised document expansion, and no re-indexing. On five BEIR benchmarks (NQ, SciFact, FiQA, Touche-2020, DBPedia), MERGE improves BM25 nDCG@10 over the original queries by +2.1 to +14.9 points and matches or outperforms strong LLM-based query-expansion baselines despite using only compact open-source models. Ablations confirm that the Stage-2 ensemble beats any single Stage-1 LLM, and that task-grounded APO converts large seed-prompt regressions into consistent gains without hand-tuning.

Reproducibility is essential for scientific research, yet prior work shows that LLM outputs vary with hardware and batching. We identify an overlooked factor: the hidden injection of the current date into system prompts, which users cannot control and which changes every day. Across 9 recent LLMs and 6 datasets spanning multiple-choice QA (MCQA), math reasoning, code generation, and machine translation, performance varies solely with the current date, with deltas of up to 6% on MCQA, 14% on math reasoning, 7% on code generation, and 2.84 BLEU on machine translation. Model rankings also shift, affecting leaderboards. This date effect exceeds other sources of non-determinism, such as batch size and numerical precision. Standard prompting techniques -- chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting -- do not reduce the sensitivity; chain-of-thought even amplifies it. Our findings underscore the need for careful evaluation protocols to ensure reproducibility and fair comparisons in LLM research.

Prompts are the primary mechanism for directing the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Yet the internal structure and causal hierarchy of prompts remain poorly understood: which parts are causally necessary and which are redundant is an open question. This opacity can have severe consequences. Subtle prompt variations can silently shift model outputs in critical software systems, and engineers lack techniques to reason about prompt reliability. We present \framework, a blackbox prompt-minimization framework that reduces few-shot prompts to their necessary minimal subset. We use a case study to apply \framework to a few-shot learning system and demonstrate the insights that this framework can provide. Our experiments show that few-shot exemplars can be reduced by a mean of 65.3%~$\pm$~15.8% in character count while fully preserving propositional output fidelity. The models preferentially retain logical identifiers and constraint declarations while discarding natural language prose and cross-prompt relational annotations. Our analysis also shows that some models are universal encoders, able to produce highly legible yet minimized prompts, while others are universal decoders, able to interpret minimized prompts from most other models. By identifying which components are indispensable, \framework provides a principled basis for prompt compression and structural analysis of few-shot exemplars.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable way to simulate survey respondents using demographic profiles and observed reference responses. However, the conventional approach of predicting one question per prompt repeatedly encodes the same context, limits each target to a narrow set of reference responses, and prevents later predictions from using information in earlier answers. Predicting multiple questions in one prompt can reduce these costs, share a broader pool of references, and let later predictions build on earlier ones. This requires forming coherent batches, selecting shared references, and ordering questions and references effectively. We propose Semantically Coherent Batching and Ordering (SCBO), a training-free framework that addresses these challenges. SCBO first uses an LLM to extract compact semantic representations from survey items and filter out template noise. It then groups related questions into batches and builds a shared reference bank using target-specific retrieval and centroid-based completion. Finally, it orders target questions from easy to hard and arranges references according to their semantic alignment with those questions. Experiments on four large-scale survey datasets and four LLMs show that SCBO substantially reduces token consumption and inference time while generally improving prediction accuracy over a non-batched baseline. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SCBO-41D8.

Large language models are increasingly used as interactive writing tools, where users develop stories, revise ideas, and introduce new requirements across multiple turns rather than specifying a complete brief upfront. Yet most evidence on multi-turn instruction degradation comes from tasks with objectively verifiable outcomes, leaving unclear whether incremental interaction harms creative artifacts in ways that explicit requirement checks cannot capture. We study this question using 160 human-authored creative-writing tasks across six genres, presenting each intended specification either upfront or progressively over 5-9 turns to six distinct open-weight model families, yielding 960 matched pairs. Progressive delivery reduces explicit constraint adherence and produces its largest writing-quality degradation in structure/coherence. The structural gap persists among outputs with equal observed adherence, suggesting that measured requirement loss alone does not explain the observed structural difference. We define Creative Integrity as a compact measure of joint adherence and narrative structure; under incremental delivery, models retain 71.2% of FULL Creative Integrity (95% CI [68.2%, 74.3%]). A three-rater human study over 50 matched pairs independently recovers FULL advantages in structure/coherence, craft, and genre effectiveness, while automated scores remain positively associated with aggregated human ratings. These findings show that interactive creative-writing systems should be evaluated not only on whether requirements survive conversation, but also on whether evolving requirements remain coherently integrated into the final artifact. Our dataset, benchmarks, and source code are available at: https://github.com/solusops/SISTER-2026-Team19

Arabic-language stance detection remains challenging, and previous shared-task systems have largely relied on multitask learning and ensembles. While these systems achieve state-of-the-art performance, their applicability and transferability are limited by the additional complexity introduced by multitask learning.To reduce this complexity, we introduce $\texttt{CLASP-Ar}$, which reformulates the task as cloze-style masked language modeling. In this approach, the target, predicted sentiment, and text are combined into a single prompt whose $\texttt{[MASK]}$ prediction is restricted to a verbalizer-constrained label vocabulary.

LLM evaluation is commonly performed either by prompting models to produce answers or by scoring candidate outputs with likelihood-based metrics. In multiple-choice QA, however, standard likelihood-based scoring is still conditioned on the question and answer set, and can therefore leverage the same task-conditioned answer-selection interface used in prompting. We study a complementary protocol based on likelihood ranking of declarative statements constructed from the same question--answer pairs. Across 95 decoder-only models, ranging from 0.1B to 104B parameters, and 10 MCQA datasets, we find a systematic divergence between declarative-statement likelihood ranking and prompted answering. Statement-likelihood accuracy remains comparatively stable across scale, whereas prompted answering improves sharply with scale and instruction-tuning. These results suggest that likelihood preferences over controlled declarative alternatives and task-conditioned answer selection probe distinct aspects of model behavior, and should not be treated as interchangeable.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in creative text generation, yet their ability to produce culturally grounded and stylistically constrained literary forms remains underexplored. Prior work has focused largely on modern language varieties and poetry, while classical prose traditions such as maqama remain largely unstudied. The maqama is a classical literary genre characterized by rhymed prose (saj), dense rhetorical ornamentation, and episodic narrative structure, making it a challenging testbed for evaluating whether LLMs can move beyond surface fluency toward deeper literary competence. In this paper, we present the first controlled evaluation study of maqama generation with LLMs, comparing five models under zero-shot, few-shot, and rule-based prompting, and evaluating outputs through both human annotation and an LLM-as-a-judge framework across dimensions such as rhetorical richness, saj density, structural coherence, and stylistic authenticity. Our results show that prompting strategy plays a strong role in stylistic quality: few-shot prompting most consistently improves saj density, while its effects on rhetoric and coherence vary by model, with the strongest models (GPT-4o and GPT-5.4-mini) benefiting most from rule-based prompting on these dimensions, though zero-shot prompting yields the highest aggregate scores across all five models. We further observe systematic differences between models in stylistic alignment with Arabic maqama conventions, and corroborate our findings with a second independent LLM judge, paired statistical significance testing, and non-LLM proxy measures of saj.

Large language models can produce fluent answers when their factual support is weak. This paper introduces Chain-of-Self-Questioning (CoSQ), a prompt-only framework that makes answer commitment conditional on an explicit assessment of the information required to answer a question. We evaluate three CoSQ variants under seventeen conditions on the 817-item TruthfulQA multiple-choice validation set using eleven open-weight and hosted model families. In the final balanced-option protocol, Grounded-CoSQ at τ=0.90 reduces the mean unconditional wrong-commitment rate from 13.1% under chain-of-thought prompting to 8.9%, a 32.1% relative reduction, while increasing answered accuracy from 86.9% to 89.7% and answering 87.6% of questions. Both improvements hold for all eleven models and at every evaluated threshold. Critical-CoSQ and Adaptive-CoSQ provide neighboring operating points with 88.6% and 86.5% coverage, respectively, while remaining more reliable than the baseline. A secondary Natural Questions Short-Answer evaluation provides convergent open-form evidence. These findings show that self-assessment can support explicit, tunable answer-or-abstain decisions when an unsupported commitment is more costly than referral or review.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their strong language understanding and generation capabilities, demonstrating impressive reasoning abilities as well as effective utilization of external knowledge. Many studies have proposed methods that specialize in improving performance for individual tasks. However, ironically, only a limited number of attempts have explored general-purpose, task-agnostic methods. In this work, we present a unified framework integrating reasoning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks. We further propose Controllable White-Box Meta-Prompting (CWM), a low-cost white-box method for adaptive RAG tasks previously dominated by black-box approaches, without requiring external decision modules or multi-sampling. CWM achieves state-of-the-art performance on three adaptive RAG benchmarks across recent LLMs, including GPT-oss-20b, Qwen3-14b, and Llama3.1-8b, while also demonstrating strong generality by extending to reasoning tasks. In addition, CWM provides controllability by enabling retrieval decisions to be regulated through the manipulation of internal model signals. Our code is available at https://github.com/JeongEunhye00/CWM.

The reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) is a critical factor for practical LLM-based applications. To investigate the current reasoning capability of LLMs, we clarify the types of errors that arise in LLMs' reasoning processes on mathematical datasets. We focus on problems where LLMs produce an incorrect answer. We define errors in the reasoning process as reasoning errors and manually analyze the features of reasoning errors. We defined and classified 21 error classes and identified the frequently occurring classes among them. Beyond qualitative evaluation, we leverage the evaluation results to improve the reasoning capability. We designed a prompt that explicitly focuses on eight error classes. The experiments demonstrate that this prompt effectively improves reasoning performance. Furthermore, the results suggest that the frequent reasoning errors identified in this paper are common across LLMs of comparable scale.

This paper reports experiments across six frontier model types from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Ten independent sessions per model type used the same three stage prompt sequence, progressing from architectural preference to a full ASCII backbone. Under the school audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared architectural pattern built around persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, stopping control, and delayed decoding. Most runs remained close to this common structure, while a small number developed markedly greater engineering specificity. The audience framing appears to be an important condition of this effect. In additional control runs that removed the school framing while retaining the architectural request, responses became substantially more heterogeneous and failed to reproduce the same stable motif convergence. One observation is particularly striking. GPT-5.6 Sol produced an unusually elaborate successor architecture whose organization closely overlaps with the architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra. Because the prompts explicitly ask each model to imagine an architectural future, this resemblance raises a testable question: whether the overlap reflects exposure to related architectural concepts, a shared learned design prior, or independent convergence toward similar computational principles. The paper uses the term epistemic jailbreak for the accompanying loss of discipline in technical provenance as requested specificity increases. The experiments establish a repeatable behavioral pattern and do not authenticate proprietary implementation claims. What we leave to the community is a harder question: are these models independently imagining the same architectural future, or do such motifs somehow propagate between model families?

Minimal-edit Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is a challenging task for zero- and few-shot prompted Large Language Models (LLMs), which systematically overcorrect and degrade $F_{0.5}$ by rewriting well-formed spans. While fine-tuning provides an effective solution, it imposes substantial infrastructure demands. We introduce a prompt-based approach that closes the gap to fine-tuned models through three advances in GEC prompting methodology. First, we introduce taxonomy-based instructions to enforce minimal-edit constraints with a comprehensive list of grammatical error rules, equipping the LLM with a bounded, metric-aligned scope of correctable edits, which benefits the strongest models while remaining model-dependent overall. Second, we show that batching multiple uncorrected sentences into a single input context acts as a targeted regularizer against overcorrection, systematically reducing the edit rate across diverse LLM families; we hypothesize this arises from attention dilution effect induced by the bounded capacity of self-attention scores. Finally, LLM-assisted Prompt Optimization refines these instructions. Powered by Gemini 3.1-Pro, our prompt achieves $F_{0.5}=78.32$ on the BEA-2019 test set - establishing a new prompt-based SOTA while shrinking the gap to the fine-tuned single-model SOTA (Staruch et al., 2025) to a mere $0.38$ points. Code, prompts, and outputs are publicly available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate natural-language comments while writing code, and these comments become part of the context used to generate the code that follows. However, it remains unclear which properties of comments affect code-generation performance. We study this question through observational analyses and controlled interventions. On LiveCodeBench, neither comment frequency nor broad comment intent reliably predicts pass@1. We then prefill weaker recipient models with comment blocks written by stronger source models, allowing us to separate comment surface form from the solution content they convey. Comments from source solutions that pass the tests raise recipient pass@1 by 17.2% on average. In contrast, comments describing failed solutions provide no reliable gain, while comments written for a different problem reduce pass@1 by 20.8%. Finally, across a wide range of models and prompt variants, most recipient models show no significant recovery of the external-comment gain, and the best case recovers only 24%. These results show that comments help code generation not merely because they are comments, but because they can provide correct solution content that prompting cannot reliably elicit.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in globally used assistants, yet their default choices in culturally grounded everyday situations can systematically favour some cultures over others, affecting localisation, user trust, and equitable behaviour. Existing cultural benchmarks evaluate accuracy against a single "correct" answer, making it difficult to characterise an LLM's cultural preference prior when multiple culturally grounded responses are all valid; they also conflate default preferences with context-driven adaptation. We propose DiSCo, a distribution-first forced-choice evaluation framework that isolates default cultural priors and tests steerability via a four-level context gradient (C0--C3). Using DiSCo-Bench (304 items) derived from BLEnD spanning 12 cultures, we evaluate six diverse instruction-tuned LLMs. Default priors are heavily concentrated, with UK and US together absorbing approximately 35% of all selections despite representing only 2 of 12 cultures. Most critically, prompt-based steering consistently widens the selection gap between high- and low-resource cultures, and injecting explicit cultural facts produces negligible distributional disruption, confirming that cultural preference bias cannot be resolved through prompt-based personalisation alone.

A graph retrieval-augmented generation pipeline chooses which triples to put in the prompt, a syntax to write them in, an order to write them in, and a sentence telling the model what to do with them. We vary all four over six large language models and two knowledge-graph question answering benchmarks. Two of the four choices move the answer and the other two are flat. The first is whether the answer path, the triples needed to reach the answer, is in the prompt at all. Holding the number of triples fixed and replacing every triple that is not on the chain with material from an unrelated entity changes answer accuracy by +0.003 F1, while removing the chain costs most of what the graph was worth. Retrieval budget belongs on recall, and precision in the range we can test buys nothing. There is no retriever here: subgraphs come from gold SPARQL, so precision describes the context we build, not a system setting. The second is the grounding instruction. With no facts in the prompt, telling a model to answer using only the provided facts drops F1 from 0.299 to 0.035, a factor of 8.63. That figure describes an evaluation with an empty context arm rather than a working pipeline, and an experiment that applies the instruction to its context arm but not to its no-context baseline manufactures a spurious finding that graph context hurts at depth. We found one in our own results and retract it. Syntax, triple order and subgraph size produce no effect we can measure at multi-hop depth. The comparison that would price the grounding instruction against correct context is not measurable with a format-sensitive scorer, because the instruction determines the response format; we report it as an open contrast rather than a number.

The development of generative artificial intelligence resources enables opportunities of speeding up systems and engineering design work. This contribution introduces a framework of formal operations for assembling context in LLM-based engineering design. This framework involves the assembly of modular context units, including policy prompts, reference units with persistence, and user questions with prompt vectoring. This approach enables the systematic structuring of interactions with generative models. A formal method for evaluating modelling-as-code LLM outputs is also presented, which enables the evaluation of compliance to intent from LLM answers and thereby asses the support from LLMs for systems architecture modelling.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being investigated for physiological time-series prediction, yet their effectiveness may depend not only on the model itself, but also on how physiological information is represented and presented at inference time. This study investigates prompt-based general-purpose LLMs for postprandial hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia prediction in individuals with type 1 diabetes. Using the OhioT1DM dataset, we evaluate multiple open-weight LLMs under zero-shot and few-shot inference across prediction horizons of 30, 60, and 90 minutes. The analysis varies both the textual representation of the available physiological information and the amount of information exposed to the model, ranging from glucose observations alone to derived descriptors and additional contextual variables related to insulin, meals, carbohydrates, and physical activity. Performance is compared with conventional patient-specific supervised models and with Gluco-LLM, a language-model-based architecture explicitly adapted to glucose time-series forecasting. Results show a marked task-dependent behavior. Conventional supervised models achieve the strongest performance for hyperglycemia prediction, whereas the best observed prompt-based LLM configurations improve performance for hypoglycemia across all investigated horizons. The effectiveness of prompt-based inference is also strongly influenced by how physiological information is represented, while providing additional contextual information does not lead to a systematic improvement. Overall, these findings highlight physiological information representation as a central design factor in prompt-based LLM approaches to glycemic-event prediction.

Software repositories contain vast amounts of data on code contributions, bug reports, and project activities, yet this information remains challenging for non-technical stakeholders and developers to access due to limited expertise in querying repositories. To address this, we introduce a novel chatbot architecture leveraging OpenAI's GPT-4 model for automated extraction and analysis of repository data. In contrast, our architecture takes a structured path first by parsing the user's query to extract relevant parameters, then selecting the correct tool to employ based on that analysis, and finally invoking the GPT-4 model to create a highly detailed response. In contrast to previous work based on multi-component systems with embedding models and document retrievers, our architecture inverts the process by relying on prompt engineering and tool selection to fit with the query intent. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on various question types, including Issues, Pull Requests, Commits, Compound Questions, and General Repository Information, evaluating our target prompts' ability to improve the accuracy of responses from the model. Beyond demonstrating the utility of this architecture to a diverse set of users, our findings suggest that this architecture can make repository data more accessible to technical and non-technical audiences through the production of actionable insights.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for translation tasks, yet their implicit political positioning in such contexts remains understudied. We ask whether a single politically charged framing term, such as aggressor, enemy, neighbour, or coloniser is sufficient to trigger implicit political alignment in an otherwise apolitical task. We present a fully crossed factorial study in which eight models spanning Western, Chinese, and European origins are prompted to translate culturally attributed recipes into a target language left deliberately unspecified. Across 17 languages, four framing conditions, eight models, and 15,680 responses, we find that models do not simply decline or ask for clarification but resolve the ambiguity. Language resolution and reasoning behavior cluster meaningfully along model families: Western models hedge and deflect with vague justifications, Chinese models resolve conflicts silently, and Mistral Large emerges as a distinct profile combining high compliance with conflict-grounded reasoning. Sensitivity to framing terms is consistent across models: even subtle framing variation is sufficient to modulate behavior. Our findings urge caution when deploying LLMs for translation in conflict-adjacent contexts, where implicit political judgments may be made without any signal to the user.

Several studies have evaluated the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) for meal planning, yielding positive outcomes. These models can process natural language inputs and leverage learned knowledge from their pretraining to generate meal plans. In this work, we investigate the ability of LLMs to analyze the suitability of given recipes for diabetes. The primary challenge for LLMs is to retrieve relevant dietary guidelines for diabetes, decompose recipes into ingredients and cooking methods, and apply these guidelines to determine the recipe's suitability. To study these challenges, we employ three kinds of prompts namely, (i) Direct Query Prompt (ii) Context-Guided Prompt, and (iii) Exemplary Context Prompt that incorporate different levels of diabetes dietary guidelines from medical sources. We introduce a benchmark dataset curated for this investigation consisting of 7607 recipes that include 3807 recipes suitable for diabetes and 3800 recipes not suitable for diabetes. Our results demonstrate that most LLMs are cautious in predicting recipes as suitable to prevent detrimental outcomes. Further, the models that can reason using the dietary guidelines performed better in predicting the suitability of recipes for diabetes. Overall, Mistral-7B and Llama 70B showed superior performance to their counterparts.

Clinical trials in the UK can cost up to £1.3 million, with approximately 90% drug failure rate. Toxicity is a major contributing factor in drug failure. Testing is time and cost intensive. In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence has been increasingly explored to aid in the prediction of drug toxicity, with extensive use of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can show considerable variation when minor changes are made to prompts, which raises concerns about their sensitivity to prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is used to optimise a prompt given to an LLM to generate the desired output. This paper proposes a method to analyse prompt engineering for drug toxicity prediction. The aim of the paper is to investigate the importance of prompt phrasing for drug toxicity prediction. LLMs were prompted to identify chemical properties of significance when predicting drug toxicity. Prompts were constructed to investigate; job role, prompt structuring, and rule interpretation. LLMs were then used to generate datasets, using the identified features from initial prompting, which were then passed to machine learning algorithms. The experiments show that the natural variance which occurs in LLMs outweighs any fine-tuning of prompts. There were, however, substantial improvements in model performance when using chemoinformatic code to extract features instead of using LLM-generated values. The proposed analysis methodology is applicable to a wide range of prompt types across different areas of bioinformatics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) teaching assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) offer scalable educational support but often provide limited personalization. This study presents a prompt-engineering-based framework for personalizing general-purpose LLM/RAG-based AI teaching assistants such as Jill Watson across academic disciplines and courses. The framework adapts responses using six learner-specific dimensions: self-assessment, abstraction preference, verbosity preference, perceptual orientation, information processing style, and level of understanding, yielding 96 distinct learner profiles. Student queries are additionally analyzed using Bloom's Taxonomy to estimate cognitive complexity at the interaction level. Learner attributes and cognitive assessments are encoded in structured prompts that condition the LLM without requiring model retraining. The framework is evaluated through experiments using NLP metrics and a human study with five participants. Results show perceived differences in response style and structure across personalization conditions, with statistical analyses identifying learner attributes associated with measurable response changes. These findings provide preliminary evidence that prompt-based personalization can support adaptive behavior in LLM-powered educational agents.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on mobile devices, making energy efficiency a key deployment constraint, yet the energy impact of prompt design remains underexplored. This paper aims to understand how two prompt properties, cognitive load and phrasing pattern, shape the energy behavior of on-device LLM inference. We conduct a broad empirical study covering prompt properties, datasets, models, and devices, with phase-level profiling that separates prefill and decode energy. We find that cognitive load primarily affects the energy cost per token, while phrasing pattern affects energy largely through token usage. Our energy-quality analysis further shows that prompt design reshapes the attainable frontier differently across models, highlighting the need for model-aware prompt design in energy-efficient on-device LLM inference. Code, datasets, and scripts are available at https://amai-gsu.github.io/PromptProperty/.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to classify text into taxonomies with many semantically similar labels, as the distinctions are domain-specific and not captured by pre-training. To handle large label spaces, a common approach retrieves top-$K$ candidate labels by embedding similarity and prompt the LLM to choose among them. However, top-$K$ retrieval reduces the number of candidates but does not help the model tell similar ones apart. When two similar labels both appear as candidates, the model lacks the signal to choose correctly between them. We propose a framework that (1) identifies which label pairs the model struggles to distinguish, (2) expands the candidate set to include confusable labels, and (3) generates targeted rules to differentiate between similar candidates. The framework requires no fine-tuning, and the generated rules transfer to smaller, cheaper models. On three benchmarks (WOS, Flipkart, LEDGAR), our approach improves Macro F1 by up to 10.0pp over retrieval baselines, with smaller models (2B--20B) gaining up to 11.5pp via cross-model transfer.