Evaluating The Impact of Stimulus Quality in Investigations of LLM Language Performance

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06018v1
• Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:16:47 GMT
• Title: Evaluating The Impact of Stimulus Quality in Investigations of LLM Language Performance
• Authors: Timothy Pistotti, Jason Brown, Michael Witbrock,
• Abstract summary: This paper investigates the hypothesis that stimuli characteristics, including lexical ambiguities and structural complexities, may confound model performance.<n>A methodology is proposed for re-evaluating LLM competence on syntactic prediction, focusing on GPT-2.<n>Preliminary findings indicate that GPT-2 demonstrates notably improved performance on these refined PG stimuli compared to baselines.
• Score: 9.161468569386708
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent studies employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to test the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (APS) have yielded contrasting results across syntactic phenomena. This paper investigates the hypothesis that characteristics of the stimuli used in recent studies, including lexical ambiguities and structural complexities, may confound model performance. A methodology is proposed for re-evaluating LLM competence on syntactic prediction, focusing on GPT-2. This involves: 1) establishing a baseline on previously used (both filtered and unfiltered) stimuli, and 2) generating a new, refined dataset using a state-of-the-art (SOTA) generative LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview) guided by linguistically-informed templates designed to mitigate identified confounds. Our preliminary findings indicate that GPT-2 demonstrates notably improved performance on these refined PG stimuli compared to baselines, suggesting that stimulus quality significantly influences outcomes in surprisal-based evaluations of LLM syntactic competency.

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