ACL 2025finding0 citations

Firm or Fickle? Evaluating Large Language Models Consistency in Sequential Interactions

Yubo Li, Yidi Miao, Xueying Ding, Ramayya Krishnan, Rema Padman

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but their deployment in high-stake domains requires consistent and coherent behavior across multiple rounds of user interaction. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving LLM response consistency, making three key contributions . First, we introduce Position-Weighted Consistency (PWC), a metric designed to capture both the importance of early-stage stability and recovery patterns in multi-turn interactions. Second, we present MT-Consistency, a carefully curated benchmark dataset spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels, specifically designed to evaluate LLM consistency under various challenging follow-up scenarios. Third, we introduce Confidence-Aware Response Generation (CARG), a framework that significantly improves response stability by explicitly integrating internal model confidence scores during the generation process. Experimental results demonstrate that CARG significantly improves response stability without sacrificing accuracy, offering a practical path toward more dependable LLM behavior in critical, real-world deployments.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{li-etal-2025-firm,
    title = "Firm or Fickle? Evaluating Large Language Models Consistency in Sequential Interactions",
    author = "Li, Yubo  and
      Miao, Yidi  and
      Ding, Xueying  and
      Krishnan, Ramayya  and
      Padman, Rema",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.347/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.347",
    pages = "6679--6700",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}