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This research reveals a pervasive positional bias in frontier LLMs, where semantically equivalent prompt reorganizations significantly alter ordinal classification predictions across label order and demonstration placement. The study finds that standard debiasing methods are unreliable, suggesting that robustness depends on the full system configuration rather than model scale alone. For developers building reliable AI systems, this highlights the critical need to jointly optimize for both predictive performance and stability against prompt artifacts.
Are LLMs Positionally Consistent Ordinal Classifiers? A Systematic Evaluation
arXiv:2608.08869v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used for ordinal classification, yet semantically equivalent changes to prompt organization can alter their predictions. We conduct systematic experiments to characterize positional bias from label order, demonstration order, and demonstration placement. First, we apply the three probes to ten frontier LLMs on a common ordinal-classification task; every model is sensitive to all three positional sources, showing that the problem is pervasive. Second, we vary eight prompt-, task-, and model-level factors across five datasets; accuracy and stability are often misaligned, and only lower scale cardinality consistently improves both. Third, we compare pointwise, pairwise, and listwise inference, alternative aggregation and debiasing methods, and joint configurations; the tested corrections do not provide a reliable remedy, while a comparison-based listwise formulation offers the best balance but transfers unevenly across models and bias sources. These findings show that positional robustness depends on the full system configuration rather than the model alone. Ordinal-classification systems should therefore be selected jointly for predictive performance and stability.
Title:Are LLMs Positionally Consistent Ordinal Classifiers? A Systematic Evaluation
Abstract:Large language models are increasingly used for ordinal classification, yet semantically equivalent changes to prompt organization can alter their predictions. We conduct systematic experiments to characterize positional bias from label order, demonstration order, and demonstration placement. First, we apply the three probes to ten frontier LLMs on a common ordinal-classification task; every model is sensitive to all three positional sources, showing that the problem is pervasive. Second, we vary eight prompt-, task-, and model-level factors across five datasets; accuracy and stability are often misaligned, and only lower scale cardinality consistently improves both. Third, we compare pointwise, pairwise, and listwise inference, alternative aggregation and debiasing methods, and joint configurations; the tested corrections do not provide a reliable remedy, while a comparison-based listwise formulation offers the best balance but transfers unevenly across models and bias sources. These findings show that positional robustness depends on the full system configuration rather than the model alone. Ordinal-classification systems should therefore be selected jointly for predictive performance and stability.
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2608.08869 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.08869v2 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.08869 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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