Do Large Language Models Plan Answer Positions? Position Bias in Multiple-Choice Question Generation
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where correct answers should ideally be uniformly distributed across options. However, we observe that LLMs exhibit systematic position biases during generation. Through extensive experiments with 10 LLMs and 5 vision-language models (VLMs) on three MCQ generation tasks, we show that these biases are structured, with similar patterns emerging within model families. To investigate the underlying mechanisms, we conduct probing experiments and find that hidden representations in the question stem encode predictive signals of the correct answer position, suggesting that answer position may be implicitly planned during generation. Building on this insight, we apply activation steering to manipulate internal representations and influence answer position. Our results show that steering can partially control positional preferences and substantially shift answer position distributions. Our findings provide a practical framework for studying implicit positional planning in LLMs and highlight the importance of controllable generation for reliable MCQ construction and evaluation.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Question GenerationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False Presuppositions
Information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions, especially when asking about unfamiliar topics. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defin…
Open-Domain Question AnsweringQuestion AnsweringDistilling Reasoning Without Knowledge: A Framework for Reliable LLMs
Fact-seeking question answering with large language models (LLMs) remains unreliable when answers depend on up-to-date or conflicting information. Although retrieval-augmented and tool-using LLMs reduce hallucinations, t…
Question AnsweringLook at the First Sentence: Position Bias in Question Answering
Many extractive question answering models are trained to predict start and end positions of answers. The choice of predicting answers as positions is mainly due to its simplicity and effectiveness. In this study, we hypo…
Extractive Question-AnsweringPositionQuestion AnsweringSentenceEnhancing Datalog Reasoning with Hypertree Decompositions
Datalog reasoning based on the semina\"ive evaluation strategy evaluates rules using traditional join plans, which often leads to redundancy and inefficiency in practice, especially when the rules are complex. Hypertree …
Decomposition-Enhanced Training for Post-Hoc Attributions In Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for long-document question answering, where reliable attribution to sources is critical for trust. Existing post-hoc attribution methods work well for extractive QA but …
Question Answering