According to Berkeley AI Research on X (Berkeley_AI), a new blog post highlights work by Butler et al. accepted to NeurIPS 2025 that systematically measures which controllable factors most influence large language model outputs, including prompt instruction phrasing, system messages, decoding settings, and context composition. As reported by the Berkeley AI Research blog, the study introduces a modeling framework to disentangle the contribution of prompt modalities and control tokens, providing reproducible ablations across multiple LLM families. According to the Berkeley AI Research announcement, the findings have practical implications for enterprises: standardized templates and constrained decoding reduce variance in generations, while curated context windows and consistent role instructions improve reliability in RAG and agent pipelines. As stated by the Berkeley AI Research post, the authors also compare sensitivity across models, informing prompt ops, evaluation design, and cost-performance trade-offs for production LLM applications.