Primacy Effect of ChatGPT
Authors: Yiwei Wang, Yujun Cai, Muhao Chen, Yuxuan Liang, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have led to promising zero-shot performance in discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. This involves querying the LLM using a prompt containing the question, and the candidate labels to choose from. The question-answering capabilities of ChatGPT arise from its pre-training on large amounts of human-written text, as well as its subsequent fine-tuning on human preferences, which motivates us to ask: Does ChatGPT also inherits humans' cognitive biases? In this paper, we study the primacy effect of ChatGPT: the tendency of selecting the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We have two main findings: i) ChatGPT's decision is sensitive to the order of labels in the prompt; ii) ChatGPT has a clearly higher chance to select the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We hope that our experiments and analyses provide additional insights into building more reliable ChatGPT-based solutions. We release the source code at https://github.com/wangywUST/PrimacyEffectGPT.
Explore the paper tree
Click on the tree nodes to be redirected to a given paper and access their summaries and virtual assistant
Look for similar papers (in beta version)
By clicking on the button above, our algorithm compares the title and abstract of this paper with all the papers of the same arXiv category that we have summarized, and finds the closest ones. You can rerun it from time to time: the results improve as our database grows.