# Prompt Sensitivity

> 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.

- Identifier: PTL-0100
- Category: Failure Modes & Evaluation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/prompt-sensitivity/
- Also known as: prompt brittleness, format sensitivity

## 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.

## Related terms

- [Exemplar Ordering](https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-ordering/)
- [Few-shot Calibration](https://protologue.com/t/few-shot-calibration/)
- [Emotion Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/emotion-prompting/)

## Sources

- Sclar et al. (2023). Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11324

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Prompt Sensitivity. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0100). https://protologue.com/t/prompt-sensitivity/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)