# Prompt Stability in Code LLMs: Measuring Sensitivity across Emotion- and Personality-Driven Variations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13680/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Measuring Coding Challenge Competence With APPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09938/) (2021)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [Does Prompt Formatting Have Any Impact on LLM Performance?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10541/) (2024)
- [From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11451/) (2025)
- [NLPerturbator: Studying the Robustness of Code LLMs to Natural Language Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19783/) (2024)
- [Probabilities of Chat LLMs Are Miscalibrated but Still Predict Correctness on Multiple-Choice Q&A](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13213/) (2024)
- [When Punctuation Matters: A Large-Scale Comparison of Prompt Robustness Methods for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11383/) (2025)
- [Evaluating the Smooth Control of Attribute Intensity in Text Generation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04460/) (2024)
- [Emotion-Conditioned Text Generation through Automatic Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04857/) (2023)
- [CodeFort: Robust Training for Code Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01567/) (2024)
- [Personality-Guided Code Generation Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00006/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Beyond the Payload: How User Invocation Shapes Coding Agent Vulnerability to Repository Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30686/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Code generation models are widely used in software development, yet their sensitivity to prompt phrasing remains under-examined. Identical requirements expressed with different emotions or communication styles can yield divergent outputs, while most benchmarks emphasize only peak performance. We present PromptSE (Prompt Sensitivity Evaluation), a framework that creates semantically equivalent prompt variants with emotion and personality templates, and that evaluates stability using probability aware continuous scoring or using binary pass rates when logits are unavailable. The results are aggregated into a proposed area under curve metric (AUC-E) for cross model comparison. Across 14 models from three families (Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek), our study shows that performance and stability behave as largely decoupled optimization objectives, and it reveals architectural and scale related patterns that challenge common assumptions about model robustness. The framework supports rapid screening for closed-source models as well as detailed stability analysis in research settings. PromptSE enables practitioners to quantify performance stability trade offs for deployment and model selection, positioning prompt stability as a complementary evaluation dimension alongside performance and fairness, and contributing to more trustworthy AI-assisted software development tools.