Mind Your Tone: Does Tone Alter LLM Performance?
Quick Take
This study reveals that tonal variations in prompts significantly affect the performance of popular LLMs like ChatGPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Flash, with some models showing notable accuracy shifts. The research highlights the importance of tone in achieving reliable outcomes in LLM applications, cautioning users against assuming consistent performance across different tones.
Key Points
- Tonal effects on LLM performance are systematic but model-dependent.
- ChatGPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Flash show significant accuracy shifts with tone variations.
- Study used datasets with multiple tone variants across various subjects.
- Subject-level differences in tone sensitivity were identified.
- A routing framework was proposed to explain tone's impact on reasoning.
Article Excerpt
From source RSS / original summaryarXiv:2605. 29027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) is proliferating, yet their performance is observed to vary based on prompting styles and tones. In this study, we investigate both whether and how tonal variations in prompts lead to disparate LLM accuracy for objective multiple-choice questions. We use two datasets: a 50-base question dataset with five tone variants and a 570-base question MMLU subset spanning 57 subjects with seven tone variants.
Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of four cost-efficient, popular LLMs: ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-5-nano, Gemini 2. 5 Flash, and Gemini 2. 5 Flash Lite. Across models, tonal effects are systematic but highly model-dependent. Some models show small, yet statistically significant, shifts, while others exhibit large accuracy swings across tones. Further, we identify subject-level differences in tone sensitivity and present a routing framework to explain how tones may attune internal reasoning modes.
Our findings caution users against assuming tone-robust reliability in LLM deployments.
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