Eduard Hovy

It is not only _what_ we ask large language models (LLMs) to do that matters, but also _how_ we ask them. Phrases like "This is urgent" or "As your supervisor" can shift model behavior without altering task content. We study this effect as **pragmatic framing**, contextual cues that shape directive interpretation rather than task specification. While prior work exploits such cues for prompt optimization or probes them as security vulnerabilities, pragmatic framing itself has received comparatively little attention as a target of controlled measurement in instruction following. To support its systematic study as a measurable property, we introduce a framework that combines three components: directive-framing decomposition separating framing context from task specification; a taxonomy organizing 400 instantiations of framing into 13 strategies across 4 mechanism clusters; and priority-based measurement that quantifies influence through observable shifts in directive prioritization. Evaluating five open-weight LLMs across different families and scales, we find that pragmatic framing produces systematic shifts in directive prioritization, and the effectiveness ranking of different strategies proves highly consistent across models. This reveals that susceptibility to pragmatic framing is a structured behavioral property of instruction-tuned systems. Measuring this susceptibility is a prerequisite for any deliberate response to it, and this work provides the framework to do so.

LLM-based agents depend on effective tool-use policies to solve complex tasks, yet optimizing these policies remains challenging dueto delayed supervision and the difficulty ofcredit assignment in long-horizon trajectories.Existing optimization approaches tend to beeither monolithic, which are pr...

Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work has shown that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: does framing also affect respo...