esfp-8b2d2409·1 events·first seen Aliases: ESFP
Researchers introduce ESFP (Epistemic Stance Flexibility Probing), a 104-item behavioral benchmark evaluating whether LLMs appropriately shift between externally attributed and self-attributed epistemic registers when prompted differently. The benchmark spans six epistemic categories and five phrasing templates, assessing models on lexical self-attribution, representation-level responsiveness, stance content density, and cross-condition consistency. Evaluating eight frontier models from five vendors, the authors find epistemic flexibility is largely orthogonal to general capability, with a 27B open-weight model matching top proprietary systems and reasoning-optimized models showing no consistent advantage. Notably, surface-level lexical markers like 'I think' can shift without corresponding changes in actual expressed stance.