# Time-To-Inconsistency: A Survival Analysis of Large Language Model Robustness to Adversarial Attacks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02712/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07858/) (2022)
- [Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13375/) (2023)
- [DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11698/) (2023)
- [Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14337/) (2021)
- [LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06120/) (2025)
- [MT-Bench-101: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14762/) (2024)
- [BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03188/) (2022)
- [Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06816/) (2023)
- [MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17399/) (2025)
- [MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16745/) (2024)
- [Are You Sure? Challenging LLMs Leads to Performance Drops in The FlipFlop Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08596/) (2023)
- [Beyond Single-Turn: A Survey on Multi-Turn Interactions with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04717/) (2025)
- [Firm or Fickle? Evaluating Large Language Models Consistency in Sequential Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22353/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Hidden Measurement Error in LLM Pipelines Distorts Annotation, Evaluation, and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11581/) (2026)
- [Consistency of Large Reasoning Models Under Multi-Turn Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13093/) (2026)
- [Quantifying LLM Safety Degradation Under Repeated Attacks Using Survival Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12869/) (2026)
- [Coordinates of Capability: A Unified MTMM-Geometric Framework for LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08522/) (2026)
- [Surviving the Unseen: Predictive Defense for Novel Multi-Turn Multimodal Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18988/) (2026)
- [Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12599/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized conversational AI, yet their robustness in extended multi-turn dialogues remains poorly understood. Existing evaluation frameworks focus on static benchmarks and single-turn assessments, failing to capture the temporal dynamics of conversational degradation that characterize real-world interactions. In this work, we present a large-scale survival analysis of conversational robustness, modeling failure as a time-to-event process over 36,951 turns from 9 state-of-the-art LLMs on the MT-Consistency benchmark. Our framework combines Cox proportional hazards, Accelerated Failure Time (AFT), and Random Survival Forest models with simple semantic drift features. We find that abrupt prompt-to-prompt semantic drift sharply increases the hazard of inconsistency, whereas cumulative drift is counterintuitively protective, suggesting adaptation in conversations that survive multiple shifts. AFT models with model-drift interactions achieve the best combination of discrimination and calibration, and proportional hazards checks reveal systematic violations for key drift covariates, explaining the limitations of Cox-style modeling in this setting. Finally, we show that a lightweight AFT model can be turned into a turn-level risk monitor that flags most failing conversations several turns before the first inconsistent answer while keeping false alerts modest. These results establish survival analysis as a powerful paradigm for evaluating multi-turn robustness and for designing practical safeguards for conversational AI systems.