Title: Time-To-Inconsistency: A Survival Analysis of Large Language Model Robustness to Adversarial Attacks
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: Large Language Models, Survival Analysis, Consistency, Multi-turn Dialogue, Time-to-Event Modeling, LLM Robustness

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized conversational AI, yet their robustness in extended multi-turn dialogues remains poorly understood. Existing evaluation frameworks focus on static benchmarks and single-turn assessments, failing to capture the temporal dynamics of conversational degradation that characterize real-world interactions. In this work, we present the first comprehensive survival analysis of conversational AI robustness, analyzing 36,951 conversation turns across 9 state-of-the-art LLMs to model failure as a time-to-event process. Our survival modeling framework—employing Cox proportional hazards, Accelerated Failure Time, and Random Survival Forest approaches—reveals extraordinary temporal dynamics. We find that abrupt, prompt-to-prompt(P2P) semantic drift is catastrophic, dramatically increasing the hazard of conversational failure. In stark contrast, gradual, cumulative drift is highly protective, vastly reducing the failure hazard and enabling significantly longer dialogues. AFT models with interactions demonstrate superior performance, achieving excellent discrimination and exceptional calibration. These findings establish survival analysis as a powerful paradigm for evaluating LLM robustness, offer concrete insights for designing resilient conversational agents, and challenge prevailing assumptions about the necessity of semantic consistency in conversational AI Systems.

TL;DR: Survival analysis of 37K LLM conversations reveals that gradual semantic drift protects against conversational failure while abrupt drift is catastrophic.