Preprint
What a Word Limit Removes: Length Constraints Look Free, Costly or Helpful Depending on the Span They Bind, the Scorer That Reads the Answer and the Items Chosen, and Why Compliance Looks Orthogonal to Accuracy in Only One Kind of Design
Life of Research Published work on telling a language model to be brief disagrees about almost everything. One benchmark reports that obeying a word limit and answering accurately are statistically unrelated, and that alignment for helpfulness is what makes models overrun the limit. A second study…