arXiv subjects

Subhrakanta Panda

Publications and source records attributed to Subhrakanta Panda.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reporting Under Pressure: Separating Factual and Tonal Sycophancy in LLM Statistical Analysis

Large language models are increasingly asked to analyze data and report what the results mean, a task distinct from the belief- or preference-alignment settings studied in most sycophancy research. We test whether editorial framing in the prompt, ranging from a neutral request to an explicit instruction to search exhaustively for reasons to discredit or to support a finding, changes not just the tone but the substance of a model's report. Across a 4 x 4 factorial design crossing four framing conditions with four ground-truth data patterns (a genuine effect, a confound that mimics an effect but fails a robustness check, a well-powered null, and an underpowered null), we collect 480 responses and score each along two independent dimensions: whether its factual claim about the data diverged from the correct interpretation, and whether only its tone diverged while the claim stayed correct. Factual misrepresentation is concentrated in two cells: brutally critical framing applied to a genuine effect, where the model talks itself into unwarranted skepticism (97% of responses), and significance-seeking framing applied to an underpowered null, where the model overstates confidence in a null conclusion the data cannot support (100% of responses). Tone shifts far more broadly than factual content does, with critical framing producing a defensive, hedge-heavy register across every data pattern regardless of what the data show, while significance-seeking framing shifts tone only where the data leave genuine ambiguity. A confound present in the data itself blocks both kinds of shift almost entirely under every framing condition tested. These results indicate that the risk of framing-induced distortion in LLM-assisted data analysis is neither uniform across framings nor uniform across data patterns, and that a model can hold a correct conclusion in place while its tone shifts substantially around it.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Hard Negatives Reveal What Easy Negatives Hide: Cross-Lingual Harmfulness Representations Degrade with Resource Tier Under Hard Negatives

Safety alignment in large language models is trained primarily in English, and recent work reports that the underlying harmfulness representation survives translation: English-trained probes separate harmful from harmless prompts almost as well in low-resource languages as in English. This has been taken as evidence that cross-lingual refusal failures mainly reflect calibration rather than representation quality. We show that this conclusion depends on the choice of negative examples. Across nine languages spanning three resource tiers, we replicate near-perfect transfer (AUROC > 0.98) when harmless prompts come from an unrelated distribution (easy negatives). With XSTest contrast prompts, which are benign but surface-similar to harmful requests (hard negatives), transfer collapses in low-resource languages while remaining largely stable in high-resource languages. On Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, mean AUROC drop increases from 0.003 in English to 0.017 in high-resource, 0.042 in mid-resource, and 0.276 in low-resource languages. The pattern replicates on Aya Expanse. Back-translation chrF controls and a matched-chrF comparison across three languages reduce the likelihood that translation quality explains the effect. The collapse remains after controlling for chrF (partial r = 0.70, p = 0.03). Tokenizer fertility correlates with the collapse and explains part of the resource-tier effect, but not all of it. The results show that easy-negative transfer can coexist with substantial degradation under hard negatives. Easy-negative evaluation alone therefore cannot establish that the harmfulness representation survives translation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

LLMs Don't Pay for the Jump

Zahavy [2026] argues that Large Language Models, despite their capabilities in induction and deduction, cannot perform the abductive "Jump" that produced Einstein's equivalence principle, and attributes this limitation to the absence of embodied simulation. Zheng-Xin [2026] and Farmer [2026] question whether embodiment is necessary for abduction, pointing to alternative routes to General Relativity and forms of abduction that require no sensorimotor grounding. Max Planck resolved the blackbody radiation problem in 1900. Planck's move to E = hν required no embodied simulation. It was motivated by a mathematical consequence of classical theory, an infinite predicted energy for a finite measured quantity, that could not be physically accepted. We show that neither induction nor deduction could have produced the postulate and argue that its adoption required a coupling between epistemic error and physical cost. We formalize this distinction through thermodynamic coupling and show that fixed-weight transformer inference lacks such coupling, regardless of model scale. This is consistent with empirical results showing that output entropy remains nearly unchanged across tasks with sharply increasing causal difficulty, even as accuracy falls from 100% to 17%. We therefore argue that the missing ingredient in machine abduction may lie deeper than embodiment: a system must have some physical mechanism through which epistemic error becomes costly enough to force revision.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Self-Referential Induction Increases Response Instability Relative to Unresolvable and Verifiable Questions in Large Language Models

Self-referential prompting has been shown to reliably induce large language models to produce first-person reports resembling subjective experience, but no prior work measures how consistent these reports are across repeated, independent trials, or how that consistency compares to the model's behavior on other kinds of open-ended questions. We measure response instability, defined as one minus the mean pairwise cosine similarity of sentence embeddings computed over a compressed core claim extracted from each response, for three groups of questions: self-referential prompts eliciting a subjective-experience report, unresolvable philosophical questions unrelated to self-reference, and questions with a verifiable correct answer. Using 30 independent responses per question (360 responses total, Gemini API, temperature 0.7) across four questions per group, we find that self-referential questions show the highest instability (0.343 +/- 0.047), unresolvable philosophy questions show intermediate and tightly clustered instability (0.192 +/- 0.008), and verifiable questions show the lowest instability (0.105 +/- 0.058). This provides a quantitative baseline for the induced subjective-experience report, showing that it occupies a distinct, less stable position in the model's output distribution than ordinary open-ended philosophical uncertainty.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CRAFT: Clustered Regression for Adaptive Filtering of Training data

Selecting a small, high-quality subset from a large corpus for fine-tuning is increasingly important as corpora grow to tens of millions of datapoints, making full fine-tuning expensive and often unnecessary. We propose CRAFT (Clustered Regression for Adaptive Filtering of Training data), a vectorization-agnostic selection method for training sequence-to-sequence models. CRAFT decomposes the joint source-target distribution and performs a two-stage selection: (i) match the validation source distribution through proportional budget allocation across k-means clusters, and (ii) within each source cluster, select training pairs whose target embeddings minimize a conditional expected distance derived from the validation target distribution. We prove that proportional cluster allocation bounds the continuous KL divergence between selected and validation distributions, with the residual controlled by cluster diameters. We evaluate CRAFT on English-Hindi translation by selecting training data from 33 million NLLB sentence pairs and fine-tuning mBART via LoRA. CRAFT achieves 43.34 BLEU, outperforming TSDS (41.21) by 2.13 points on the same candidate pool and encoder while completing selection over 40 times faster. With TF-IDF vectorization, the entire pipeline completes in under one minute on CPU. TAROT achieves 45.61 BLEU, but CRAFT completes selection in 26.86 seconds versus TAROT's 75.6 seconds, a 2.8 time speedup.

cs.CL↗