Firm or Fickle? Evaluating Large Language Models Consistency in Sequential Interactions
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but their deployment in high-stake domains requires consistent and coherent behavior across multiple rounds of user interaction. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving LLM response consistency, making three key contributions. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/yubol-bobo/MT-Consistency. First, we introduce Position-Weighted Consistency (PWC), a metric designed to capture both the importance of early-stage stability and recovery patterns in multi-turn interactions. Second, we present MT-Consistency, a carefully curated benchmark dataset spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels, specifically designed to evaluate LLM consistency under various challenging follow-up scenarios. Third, we introduce Confidence-Aware Response Generation (CARG), a framework that significantly improves response stability by explicitly integrating internal model confidence scores during the generation process. Experimental results demonstrate that CARG significantly improves response stability without sacrificing accuracy, offering a practical path toward more dependable LLM behavior in critical, real-world deployments.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 45 of its 64 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2025.
Builds on
45 of 64 references.
References · 45
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
- 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,963
- 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,374
- 2021On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelscited by 4,033
- 2021TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoodscited by 2,975
- 2023Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4cited by 2,592
- 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,822
- 2023Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Promptingcited by 1,122
- 2016ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledgecited by 1,067
- 2023Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Modelscited by 1,040
- 2023Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMscited by 974
33 more
- 2022Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluationscited by 836
- 2023Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formattingcited by 817
- 2018Scalable agent alignment via reward modeling: a research directioncited by 447
- 2023Trustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignmentcited by 401
- 2018AI safety via debatecited by 400
- 2022Self-critiquing models for assisting human evaluatorscited by 380
- 2023Adaptive Chameleon or Stubborn Sloth: Revealing the Behavior of Large Language Models in Knowledge Conflictscited by 341
- 2023State of What Art? A Call for Multi-Prompt LLM Evaluationcited by 310
- 2023MINT: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-turn Interaction with Tools and Language Feedbackcited by 297
- 2024TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Modelscited by 285
- 2024Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Surveycited by 283
- 2023OpenAGI: When LLM Meets Domain Expertscited by 197
- 2023Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?cited by 177
- 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systemscited by 170
- 2024Large Language Models are Inconsistent and Biased Evaluatorscited by 153
- 2024Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agentscited by 127
- 2023The Earth is Flat because...: Investigating LLMs' Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversationcited by 109
- 2024Limitations of the LLM-as-a-Judge Approach for Evaluating LLM Outputs in Expert Knowledge Taskscited by 106
- 2024AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulatorcited by 101
- 2024Tug-of-War Between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Modelscited by 93
- 2024What Did I Do Wrong? Quantifying LLMs' Sensitivity and Consistency to Prompt Engineeringcited by 90
- 2024A Systematic Survey and Critical Review on Evaluating Large Language Models: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendationscited by 85
- 2023EduChat: A Large-Scale Language Model-based Chatbot System for Intelligent Educationcited by 80
- 2023BianQue: Balancing the Questioning and Suggestion Ability of Health LLMs with Multi-turn Health Conversations Polished by ChatGPTcited by 65
- 2023Why So Gullible? Enhancing the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Models against Counterfactual Noisecited by 54
- 2023Disinformation Detection: An Evolving Challenge in the Age of LLMscited by 41
- 2024Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performancecited by 41
- 2024Large Language Models for Medicine: A Surveycited by 38
- 2024Comparing GPT-4 and Open-Source Language Models in Misinformation Mitigationcited by 9
- 2023Ask Again, Then Fail: Large Language Models' Vacillations in Judgmentcited by 8
- 2023Assessing the Effectiveness of GPT-3 in Detecting False Political Statements: A Case Study on the LIAR Datasetcited by 7
- 2024Mitigating Sycophancy in Decoder-Only Transformer Architectures: Synthetic Data Interventioncited by 5
- 2023Improving Language Models Meaning Understanding and Consistency by Learning Conceptual Roles from Dictionarycited by 4
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 9.
13 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2025Time-To-Inconsistency: A Survival Analysis of Large Language Model Robustness to Adversarial Attackscited by 6
- 2026On the effectiveness of reward functions in reinforcement learning for confidence calibration of large language modelscited by 2
- 2025CancerGUIDE: Cancer Guideline Understanding via Internal Disagreement Estimationcited by 1
- 2025Making LLMs Reliable When It Matters Most: A Five-Layer Architecture for High-Stakes Decisionscited by 1
- 2025Epistemic Familiarity is Associated With Belief Stability in Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Communication Enhances LLMs' Stability in Strategic Thinkingcited by 1
- 2026Confidence Should Be Calibrated More Than One Turn Deepcited by 1
- 2026Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Multi-Turn Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Towards Multi-modal Multi-turn Safety: From Agentic Interaction to Strategic Alignmentcited by 0
- 2026Evaluating Epistemic Guardrails in AI Reading Assistants: A Behavioral Audit of a Minimal Prototypecited by 0
- 2026Cheap Talk Stabilizes Strategic Interaction in LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Toward a Graded Measure of Belief Stability in Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Not All Answers Are Contextually Persuadable: Inference Dynamics in Large Language Models under Contextual Influence3 Oct 2026
- 2026Toward a Graded Measure of Belief Stability in Large Language Models28 Sep 2026
- 2026Cheap Talk Stabilizes Strategic Interaction in LLM Agents14 Sep 2026
- 2026On the effectiveness of reward functions in reinforcement learning for confidence calibration of large language models5 Jul 2026
- 2026Evaluating Epistemic Guardrails in AI Reading Assistants: A Behavioral Audit of a Minimal Prototype30 Apr 2026
- 2026Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Multi-Turn Language Models24 Apr 2026
- 2026Confidence Should Be Calibrated More Than One Turn Deep7 Apr 2026
- 2026Communication Enhances LLMs' Stability in Strategic Thinking4 Feb 2026
- 2026Towards Multi-modal Multi-turn Safety: From Agentic Interaction to Strategic Alignment8 Jan 2026
- 2025Epistemic Familiarity is Associated With Belief Stability in Large Language Models24 Nov 2025
- 2025Making LLMs Reliable When It Matters Most: A Five-Layer Architecture for High-Stakes Decisions10 Nov 2025
- 2025Time-To-Inconsistency: A Survival Analysis of Large Language Model Robustness to Adversarial Attacks3 Oct 2025
1 more
- 2026Cheap Talk Stabilizes Strategic Interaction in LLM Agents14 Sep 2026
- 2025Time-To-Inconsistency: A Survival Analysis of Large Language Model Robustness to Adversarial Attackscited by 6
- 2026On the effectiveness of reward functions in reinforcement learning for confidence calibration of large language modelscited by 2
- 2025CancerGUIDE: Cancer Guideline Understanding via Internal Disagreement Estimationcited by 1
- 2025Making LLMs Reliable When It Matters Most: A Five-Layer Architecture for High-Stakes Decisionscited by 1
- 2025Epistemic Familiarity is Associated With Belief Stability in Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Confidence Should Be Calibrated More Than One Turn Deepcited by 1
- 2026Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Multi-Turn Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Evaluating Epistemic Guardrails in AI Reading Assistants: A Behavioral Audit of a Minimal Prototypecited by 0
- 2026Toward a Graded Measure of Belief Stability in Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Not All Answers Are Contextually Persuadable: Inference Dynamics in Large Language Models under Contextual Influencecited by 0
- 2026Not All Answers Are Contextually Persuadable: Inference Dynamics in Large Language Models under Contextual Influence3 Oct 2026
- 2026Toward a Graded Measure of Belief Stability in Large Language Models28 Sep 2026
- 2026On the effectiveness of reward functions in reinforcement learning for confidence calibration of large language models5 Jul 2026
- 2026Evaluating Epistemic Guardrails in AI Reading Assistants: A Behavioral Audit of a Minimal Prototype30 Apr 2026
- 2026Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Multi-Turn Language Models24 Apr 2026
- 2026Confidence Should Be Calibrated More Than One Turn Deep7 Apr 2026
- 2025Epistemic Familiarity is Associated With Belief Stability in Large Language Models24 Nov 2025
- 2025Making LLMs Reliable When It Matters Most: A Five-Layer Architecture for High-Stakes Decisions10 Nov 2025
- 2025Time-To-Inconsistency: A Survival Analysis of Large Language Model Robustness to Adversarial Attacks3 Oct 2025
- 2025CancerGUIDE: Cancer Guideline Understanding via Internal Disagreement Estimation9 Sep 2025