Beyond Model Bias: Cross-Entropy Based Rankings in Literary and Academic Texts Remain Stable across Small Language Models

Abstract

While language models provide powerful mechanisms for evaluating textual predictability, it remains unclear whether the relative extents of LM surprisal remain stable across models. This study presents empirical evidence of the invariance of ranking based on cross-entropy related measures (e.g. mean, variance of each data-point), across four distinct small scale transformer-based models, for a given dataset of text sources. We consider two stylistic environments: a corpus of contemporary poetry and a corpus of academic research papers. We demonstrate that mean and variance of cross-entropy maintain robust cross-model rank correlation ($\rho > 0.90$) across both regimes. To test whether this agreement merely reflects generic differences in textual complexity, we compare it against six parameter-free compression baselines. The extent of agreement among language models is found to be substantially higher than that among model-baselines, for most of the measures. Geometric analysis of the structurally constrained academic regime reveals that higher-order moments are sensitive to specific models, although strong agreement persists. The findings suggest that relative extents of textual unpredictability may be independent of the language model they are computed against.