# Impact of Task Phrasing on Presumptions in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00436/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08399/) (2023)
- [Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07702/) (2023)
- [Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Agents for Clinical Decision Making in Oncology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04667/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Concerns with the safety and reliability of applying large-language models (LLMs) in unpredictable real-world applications motivate this study, which examines how task phrasing can lead to presumptions in LLMs, making it difficult for them to adapt when the task deviates from these assumptions. We investigated the impact of these presumptions on the performance of LLMs using the iterated prisoner's dilemma as a case study. Our experiments reveal that LLMs are susceptible to presumptions when making decisions even with reasoning steps. However, when the task phrasing was neutral, the models demonstrated logical reasoning without much presumptions. These findings highlight the importance of proper task phrasing to reduce the risk of presumptions in LLMs.