llm-short-counter-answer-adoption-rate
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/xie-2024-chameleon-sloth-sA-appendix-chunk-1.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:58:59+00:00
LLMs adopt a short counter-answer (bare answer without explanation) in only 18.8% of cases versus 56.7% for a full counter-memory paragraph on POPQA.
Summary
When an LLM is given a correction, the way that correction is packaged matters enormously: a terse one-line answer is largely ignored, while a fuller explanatory paragraph gets absorbed at roughly three times the rate. This means any system that wants to steer or update an LLM's outputs should invest in giving it richer, contextualized corrections rather than bare short answers, or it will waste most of its corrections.