{
  "id": "prompt-sensitivity",
  "code": "PTL-0100",
  "term": "Prompt Sensitivity",
  "aliases": [
    "prompt brittleness",
    "format sensitivity"
  ],
  "category": "failure-modes",
  "definition": "Prompt sensitivity is the variation in a model's performance caused by superficial changes to a prompt, such as formatting, separators, spacing, or wording, that do not change the task's meaning.",
  "description": "Sclar et al. found accuracy differences of tens of percentage points from formatting choices alone, and argued that evaluations should report performance across a range of plausible formats.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "exemplar-ordering",
    "few-shot-calibration",
    "emotion-prompting"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting",
      "authors": "Sclar et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11324"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/prompt-sensitivity/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Prompt Sensitivity. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0100). https://protologue.com/t/prompt-sensitivity/"
}