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The System Prompt Illusion: How Instruction Preambles Modify Computation in Language Models

This story is from 2026-10-01. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

arXiv:2609.38205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: System prompts are the primary lever practitioners use to control language model behavior, yet what they actually do to the computation inside the transformer remains poorly understood. Across 17 instruction-tuned models spanning 8 architecture famili…

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  1. 2026-10-01 04:00 · arXiv cs.CL
    The System Prompt Illusion: How Instruction Preambles Modify Computation in Language Models

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