Silicon sampling uses language models as proxies for human survey respondents, treating each model call as an independent draw from the persona’s response distribution. We show this draw does not exist: instruction-tuned models do not sample from distributions, they collapse to a single output. The same persona on the same question returns the same answer on more than half of items in a public-opinion benchmark, and the model’s internal probabilities concentrate on a single option. The failure is associated with, and amplified by, instruction-targeted post-training: instruction-tuned models are worse than their own bases in every family we can compare, the gap widens at each successive post-training stage and with the size of the tuning update, and continued pretraining on non-instruction tokens leaves it unchanged. Yet the knowledge survives: the same model that cannot sample from a distribution can describe it accurately in a single call. We call this gap the KNOWS/DOES split. Exploiting the split, a single call that asks the model to describe the response distribution more than halves the error against human survey data compared to persona aggregation. When per-persona outputs are required, we propose Prompt-Perturbed Argyle (PPA), which reduces the same error by 21%, spreading each persona’s answers to mirror real population differences at no added cost.

Addressing the challenges in QA for specific technical domains requires identifying relevant portions of extensive documents and generating answers based on this focused content. Traditional pre-trained LLMs often struggle with domain-specific terminology, while fine-tuned LLMs demand substantial computational resources. To overcome these limitations, we propose TIDES, Technical Information Distillation and Extraction System. TIDES is a training-free approach that combines traditional TF-IDF techniques with prompt-based LLMs in a hybrid process, effectively addressing complex technical questions. It uses TF-IDF to identify and prioritize domain-specific words that are rare in other documents and LLMs to refine the candidate pool by focusing on the most relevant segments in documents through multiple stages. Our approach improves the precision and efficiency of QA systems in technical contexts without LLM retraining.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is crucial for ensuring the safety and robustness of models deployed in real-world scenarios. While most studies on OOD detection focus on fine-tuned models trained on in-distribution (ID) data, detecting OOD in pre-trained models is also important due to computational limitations and the widespread use of open-source pre-trained models. However, in the same domain shift setting, the OOD detection performance of pre-trained models is insufficient because both ID and OOD samples originate from the same domain, leading to a high overlap in their embeddings. To address this issue, we introduce a new method called CED, a training-free OOD detection technique designed to enhance the distinction between ID and OOD datasets. We theoretically validate that specific auxiliary and oracle samples that satisfy certain conditions improve this distinction. Motivated by our theoretical analysis, CED enhances the differentiation by utilizing these specially designed auxiliary and oracle samples. As a result, CED significantly improves the ability of pre-trained models to distinguish between ID and OOD samples in text classification and hallucination detection tasks. Furthermore, we verify that CED is a plug-and-play method compatible with various backbone networks, such as RoBERTa, Llama, and OpenAI Embedding.