ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs

Jingming Zhuo, Songyang Zhang, Xinyu Fang, Haodong Duan, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance is highly sensitive to the prompts utilized. This variability poses challenges for accurate assessment and user satisfaction. Current research frequently overlooks instance-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce ProSA, a framework designed to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in LLMs. ProSA incorporates a novel sensitivity metric, PromptSensiScore, and leverages decoding confidence to elucidate underlying mechanisms. Our extensive study, spanning multiple tasks, uncovers that prompt sensitivity fluctuates across datasets and models, with larger models exhibiting enhanced robustness. We observe that few-shot examples can alleviate this sensitivity issue, and subjective evaluations are also susceptible to prompt sensitivities, particularly in complex, reasoning-oriented tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that higher model confidence correlates with increased prompt robustness. We believe this work will serve as a helpful tool in studying prompt sensitivity of LLMs. The project is released at: https://github.com/open-compass/ProSA.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.108
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1950–1976
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.108
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingming Zhuo, Songyang Zhang, Xinyu Fang, Haodong Duan, Dahua Lin, and Kai Chen. 2024. ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 1950–1976, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs (Zhuo et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.108.pdf