Junpeng Zhang
2026
Challenging the Explanation Based on Preceding Tokens: Discovering Transferable Non-Literal Biasing
Yuchen Huang | Junpeng Zhang | Quanshi Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Yuchen Huang | Junpeng Zhang | Quanshi Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
In this paper, we find that the generated preceding tokens, which are not directly related to the answer, may still significantly push the large language model (LLM) towards the target answer. More crucially, the biased connotations of target answer in the preceding tokens can also transfer to other prompts. This finding suggests that the LLM may intentionally use the semantically unrelated tokens to help the generation of the target answer. Our finding offers a new perspective on understanding the long-range dependency phenomena in LLMs.