arXiv：cs.CL· Tony Mason·· 3 小时前
祈使句干扰：社会语域如何塑造大语言模型的指令拓扑结构
Imperative Interference: Social Register Shapes Instruction Topology in Large Language Models
AI 导读
研究发现，相同语义的系统提示词指令在英语中协同、在西班牙语中竞争，呈现相反的交互拓扑。对四种语言、四个模型的指令级消融实验表明，这一拓扑反转由社会语域中介：将单个指令块改写为陈述句可使跨语言方差降低81%（p = 0.029）；改写11个祈使块中的3个即可使西班牙语指令拓扑从竞争转为协同。
正文
Abstract:System prompt instructions that cooperate in English compete in Spanish, with the same semantic content, but opposite interaction topology. We present instruction-level ablation experiments across four languages and four models showing that this topology inversion is mediated by social register: the imperative mood carries different obligatory force across speech communities, and models trained on multilingual data have learned these conventions. Declarative rewriting of a single instruction block reduces cross-linguistic variance by 81% (p = 0.029, permutation test). Rewriting three of eleven imperative blocks shifts Spanish instruction topology from competitive to cooperative, with spillover effects on unrewritten blocks. These findings suggest that models process instructions as social acts, not technical specifications: "NEVER do X" is an exercise of authority whose force is language-dependent, while "X: disabled" is a factual description that transfers across languages. If register mediates instruction-following at inference time, it plausibly does so during training. We state this as a testable prediction: constitutional AI principles authored in imperative mood may create language-dependent alignment. Corpus: 22 hand-authored probes against a production system prompt decomposed into 56 blocks.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2603.25015 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2603.25015v2 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.25015 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Tony Mason [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:25:14 UTC (56 KB)
[v2]
Wed, 7 Oct 2026 18:16:09 UTC (53 KB)
来源：arXiv：cs.CL · arxiv.org