Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Prompt Echoing in Small Instruct Language Models

arXiv:2609.15045 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-14

Updated: 2026-09-14

Comments: accepted at EMNLP 2026

Code: https://github.com/CredibleAI/Echo

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Ablation — 10× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• In-Context Learning — 5× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Adam — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Activation Patching — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Quantization — 1× in this paper · explained in 12 episodes

Sources

• Language models fail at extended rule following
• Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLMs
• Qwen3 Technical Report

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