Testing Conversation Preservation Across LLM APIs: A Rule-Based Oracle for Detecting Silent Information Loss
Xin Liu, Xu Han, Yuxin Wang, Haoran Song, Mingjian Zhao, Lei Wang
原文摘要
LLM applications increasingly rely on translators and compatibility layers to move conversations across APIs. Yet a translated request can be accepted by the target API while silently losing information about instruction roles, tool interactions, error states, or generation controls. We introduce isloss, a deterministic oracle for testing conversation-information preservation across LLM API translations. It maps source and translated requests and replies to a shared intermediate representation, ConvIR, and applies explicit rules to distinguish legitimate representation changes from information loss. Unlike schema validation or reference-based differential testing, isloss requires neither a reference translation nor additional model calls. It also distinguishes avoidable loss from degradation caused by target API limitations. We evaluate isloss using specification-based fault injection, human review, and experiments on translators, gateways, and client libraries. On held-out tests, it detects 95/125 planted faults (76.0%) with 2/100 false alarms (2.0%). Across a synthetic request suite spanning six configurations of five translator codebases, 127/685 completed translations (18.5%) pass static target checks while silently changing prompt, role, or tool information in ways the target API could have preserved. In translated replies, 203/558 streams (36.4%) cause exceptions or silent corruption in at least one tested official OpenAI SDK. Targeted experiments across six models show that translation-induced changes can alter model behaviour when tasks depend on the affected information. These results establish conversation preservation as a distinct correctness requirement for reliable LLM interoperability, agent execution, and model evaluation.
cs.SE · cs.AI