Single Canonical Prompts Underestimate LLM Safety's Surface-Form Sensitivity
A benchmark score is a measurement instrument, yet most benchmarks read each item at a single canonical surface form. We ask whether that reading is faithful: when an item's intent is held fixed and only its meaning-preserving surface form varies, does the canonical-form score estimate model behavior well, and how much of any variation is decoding/judge noise rather than signal? We instantiate this in safety, a high-stakes setting with no gold label to average toward. To avoid prior confounds, we pre-author the reformulations (refusal-free, mostly non-LLM: machine back-translation and a Matrix-Language-Frame code-switch generator) so an identical surface form reaches every model, score al...
| Authors | Yongxi Zhou, Junwei Yao, Yuanzhe Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 1 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
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