Assess whether rare-event engagement scales to larger language models

Determine whether the interaction between elicitation structure and extreme failure rarity observed in qwen3:8b, llama3.1:8b, and mistral:7b persists, strengthens, or disappears in larger-scale language models.

Background

The study deliberately restricts evaluation to three relatively small open-weight models because local execution makes the rare-event trial schedule computationally feasible and reproducible. This design supports comparisons among the selected models but does not establish how model scale affects the observed interaction between rarity and elicitation structure.

The authors explicitly separate this scaling question from the paper’s primary research objective. Larger models, including models outside the small local open-weight regime, could exhibit the same interaction, a stronger one, or no such interaction at all.