LLM psychological profiles are largely measurement artifacts, not model properties
A new arXiv preprint administers a battery of personality and risk-preference instruments to 56 instruction-tuned LLMs alongside large human reference samples, finding that 81-90% of between-model variation is explained by directional response bias rather than the traits the instruments target. The authors introduce the concept of 'response orthogonality' to explain why some instruments appear more reliable than others, and show that apparent psychological profiles can be manufactured through item selection. The findings challenge the validity of using human-designed psychometric tools to characterize LLMs, with direct implications for safety assessment and the use of LLMs as proxies for human participants in research.
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LLMs fail to consistently simulate demographic perspective-taking in hate speech annotation
A new arXiv paper evaluates whether persona-conditioned LLMs can replicate how different demographic groups perceive hate speech, testing three dimensions: inter-group disagreement, in-group sensitivity, and vicarious prediction. No model consistently captures all three dimensions, and performance is highly model-dependent rather than emerging reliably from identity prompts alone. Vicarious prompting with Llama 3.1 provides the closest approximation to human disagreement patterns across demographic axes. The findings have implications for using LLMs as proxies for diverse human annotators in content moderation tasks.
LLMs automate reproducibility assessments in social and behavioral sciences, outperforming human reanalysts
A preprint from arXiv demonstrates that an LLM pipeline can automate reproducibility assessments of published social and behavioral science studies, recovering original effect sizes in 41% of cases (vs. 34% for human reanalysts) and reaching the same qualitative conclusion in 96% of cases (vs. 74% for humans). The study evaluated 76 published studies with predefined claims. The results suggest LLMs could serve as a scalable tool for systematic auditing of empirical research, addressing the resource-intensive nature of traditional reproducibility efforts.
Paper challenges LLM expert-level claims by measuring variance and error magnitude in code-based data analysis tasks
A new arXiv paper argues that standard LLM benchmarks overstate model capabilities by focusing on average performance on training-data-adjacent tasks while ignoring response variance and error magnitude. The authors introduce a novel benchmark requiring frontier LLMs to write code for data analysis tasks, comparing results against human expert submissions. Human experts outperformed the frontier LLM on average across multiple metrics and showed lower performance variability. The findings challenge the prevailing narrative that LLMs perform at human-expert level on knowledge economy tasks.
Benchmarking study finds LLMs fail at counterintuitive probability problems despite strong standard performance
A new arXiv paper evaluates 8 state-of-the-art LLMs on discrete probability problems using two datasets: standard exercises (average accuracy 0.96) and counterintuitive exercises designed to trigger heuristic reasoning (average accuracy 0.59). The authors document token bias causing 20%+ performance drops when canonical problem formulations are disguised, and up to 34% degradation when misleading suggestions are embedded in prompts. The findings argue that current LLMs are not genuine probabilistic reasoners despite their success on advanced math benchmarks.
Study of security and privacy prompts in the wild reveals LLM response quality gaps and inconsistency
Researchers analyzed 14,727 security and privacy (S&P) prompts drawn from WildChat's 3.2M real user-LLM conversations, categorizing them into nine topic areas and evaluating response quality across 270 advice-seeking prompts. Commercial models substantially outperformed open-weight models (GPT achieving 98% 'good enough' responses vs. Llama 4 at 47%), but even high-performing commercial models showed inconsistent responses across repeated runs of the same prompt. The study is the first to analyze real user S&P queries to LLMs rather than expert-authored test sets, surfacing both a capability gap and a reliability concern.
Mitigating Perceptual Judgment Bias in Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge via Perceptual Perturbation and Reward Modeling
This paper identifies and analyzes 'Perceptual Judgment Bias' in multimodal LLM judges, where models anchor on response text rather than visual evidence when the two conflict. The authors introduce a Perceptually Perturbed Judgment Dataset using counterfactual responses to isolate perceptual errors, and a training framework combining GRPO-based reward modeling with batch-ranking objectives. Experiments on MLLM-as-a-Judge benchmarks show improved perceptual fidelity, ranking coherence, and alignment with human evaluation.
LLMs Show Inverted Compositional Strengths vs. Humans on Reference Resolution Task
This paper evaluates LLMs and humans on the Personal Relation Task (Paperno 2022), distinguishing between Extensional tasks (resolving what an expression refers to) and Intensional tasks (representing structured sense/formula). The study finds that humans outperform LLMs on Extensional tasks while LLMs outperform humans on Intensional tasks—an inverted pattern of strengths. The authors argue this asymmetry reflects the absence of referential grounding in LLM training as a key gap in human-like language understanding.
Tracing the Emergence of Human-Like Pragmatic Reasoning in LLMs Across Languages
Researchers conducted a population-matching experiment evaluating 25 LLMs on conditional inference tasks across four languages, comparing model behavior to matched human populations. The study finds that LLMs function as accurate semantic operators but systematically fail to capture pragmatic enrichments—context-sensitive inferences beyond literal logical meaning—that humans apply effortlessly. Model performance on pragmatic reasoning is not predicted by open vs. closed weights, training orientation, or architecture type, suggesting pragmatic reasoning remains an emergent and unreliable capability. The findings contribute to ongoing debates about whether LLMs reason like humans or merely approximate surface-level linguistic patterns.