arXiv Computation and Language

Unmatched Does Not Mean False: Incomplete Reference Sets Can Reverse Calibration Rankings in Open-Ended Theory-of-Mind Tracking

The paper demonstrates that open‑ended Theory‑of‑Mind trackers can produce valid beliefs that are absent from finite reference sets, and that treating unmatched outputs as false can reverse model‑selection rankings. By recoding references for 259 beliefs, the authors show a dramatic drop in weighted prevalence and a reversal of strictly proper Brier risk, with similar distortions observed in a 301‑question NQ‑open DPR‑BERT pipeline. The study further reveals that 90‑96% of audited unmatched beliefs are literally true, and introduces a TriSource‑Restore method that anchors reference labels to a probability‑sampled human pilot to restore calibration and ranking integrity.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

When Answer Evaluation Misleads Confidence Selection: Fact-Grounded Form Grading for Open-Ended QA

The paper examines how calibration rules for open‑ended question answering can be misled by the choice of correctness labels, noting that exact‑match labels can produce misleading confidence estimates. It introduces FactForm, a fact‑grounded form grader that combines reference matching with evidence retrieval, achieving lower error and higher AUROC than traditional graders on a large benchmark. FactForm’s design allows a single LLM call per answer and demonstrates stable performance across runs.

By Zhexi Feng, Bingrui Zhang, Wuxi Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

arXiv:2606. 15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input.

By Xian Sun, Wei Gao, Yingshuo Wang, Lingdong Kong, Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan, Zexin Zhuang, Wenlong Dong, Zhiyuan Zheng, Hrishikesh Paranjape, Abhishek Mandal, Johnny R. Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Does the Selected Object Reach the Reader? Auditing Identity Handoffs in Grounded Language-Model Pipelines

The paper investigates whether the object selected in a grounded language‑model pipeline actually reaches the reader, a failure that can break the handoff between stages. By auditing 600 HybridQA questions across three selector families, the authors find that exact key lookup and title matching recover the selected object in all 1,463 resolvable records, but body‑only BM25 omits it in 26.6% of cases at cutoff five, while hybrid retrieval with reranking omits it only 1.0%. The study also shows that misalignment between selected and retrieved objects can reduce exact match scores by up to 31 points, and introduces the Returned‑Object Profile (ROP) as a tool for reproducible auditing.

By Siddharth Vohra, Runmin Jiang, Xiaomo Li, Min Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

The Truth Was Never Gone: Perfect Aliasing in Compliant-Context Truth Probes

The paper introduces the concept of perfect aliasing, where a truth probe that aligns truthful reporting with a task’s prescribed action cannot differentiate between the two based solely on its labels. In a binary reporting game, probes fitted on compliant contexts yield identical optimizations, while on rival contexts their labels are complementary, causing their AUROCs to sum to one across 751 cell-layer pairs. By employing randomized codebooks and mixed-context fitting, the authors demonstrate that separating prescribed output symbols from semantic action enables perfect recovery of truth, achieving an AUROC of 1.000 on rival trials for a reward-trained Gemma-2-9B policy, whereas conventional probes perform near chance.

By Dylan Jayabahu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Correct Now, Insufficient Later: Auditing Update Sufficiency in Context Compression

The paper investigates how memory systems can answer a current query correctly yet fail to retain distinctions needed for later updates. Using a paired‑history audit, the authors evaluate 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms and two model backends, achieving perfect reveal accuracy on DeepSeek and high accuracy on GLM. Record‑level audits reveal specific failures in structured reveal memories and frontier late‑reference adequacy, and the authors test a label‑equivariant repair that only partially restores correctness.

By Guangzhe Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

CARGO: Context-Aware Retrieval-Gated Evaluation of Agentic AI in Production

CARGO is a framework for evaluating agentic AI systems in production that addresses the problem of reference-instance divergence (RID), where reference-based judges penalize correct answers that involve different entity identifiers. It treats retrieved references as procedural exemplars, grounds judgments in the live instance’s context, assigns a three-way status to claims, and gates evaluation by retrieval confidence. Using the CARGO-Bench diagnostic suite, CARGO eliminates false penalties and improves discrimination while revealing a limitation in detecting procedural corruptions.

By Mukul Chhabra, Shail Patel, Luigi Medrano
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

What Changes When Fact-Verification Scores Improve? Evidence and Answer Accounting Across Trained Verifiers and LLMs

The paper introduces a joint fact‑verification score that evaluates both answers and the evidence submitted with them. On the FEVEROUS dataset, replacing the DCUF evidence with UnifEE evidence improves the strict score by about 9.6 percentage points, while answer accuracy rises only 1.96 points. The study also shows that increasing context length for large language models yields modest evidence‑gain improvements, and that detailed answer‑evidence analyses uncover patterns missed by aggregate metrics.

By Han Chen, Yingrui Li