Model Releases
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Prompt Echoing in Small Instruct Language Models
arXiv:2609.15045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt echoing is a recognized failure mode of instruct language models, in which a model instead of generating a response, mirrors the provided promp
arXiv:2609.15045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt echoing is a recognized failure mode of instruct language models, in which a model instead of generating a response, mirrors the provided prompt, even though it did not receive a specific instruction to do so. Is this phenomenon a sign of the model leaking the content of its training dataset, or is it rather caused by a misaligned behavior of the internal induction/copying mechanisms? We investigate prompt echoing small language models from different families (Gemma, Llama, Qwen, SmolLM and OLMo) and show that echoing prompts are likely to have partial overlap with the training dataset but the phenomenon is primarily driven by the model's induction heads.
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Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-15