arXiv AI

Evaluating human and LLM screening workflows in a conceptually complex scoping review: Recall--workload trade-offs and run-to-run consistency

The study compared human and large language model (LLM) workflows for title‑and‑abstract screening in a complex scoping review. Human reviewers and two GPT‑5.4 file‑batch runs retained 42.2‑45.0% of records with 82.3‑82.9% recall, while Gemini 3.1 achieved the highest recall (83.9%) but retained 56.7% of records. Identical GPT‑5.4 runs showed 91.7% agreement yet differed on 94 records, including 29 verified eligible ones.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Has LLM Screening Performance Stalled in Software Engineering Systematic Reviews?

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) have improved in screening systematic reviews (SRs) within software engineering. Using the SESR‑Eval benchmark and a new smaller dataset, the authors evaluated eight recent LLMs and found only marginal performance gains over older models (average MCC rose from 0.347 to 0.365). The research also examined prompt variations, inter‑model agreement, and the impact of refining inclusion/exclusion criteria, concluding that LLMs still fall short of replacing human reviewers and that future work should explore agent‑based methods, prompt engineering, and further criteria refinement.

By Aleksi Huotala, Miikka Kuutila, Mika M\"antyl\"a
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Auditing Escalation Reliability in Healthcare LLM Agents: A Perturbation-Controlled Benchmark of Workflow-State Failures

The paper introduces a benchmark of 400 synthetic healthcare workflow episodes to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents’ reliability in escalating care when evidence is missing or conflicting. It finds that while clean decision accuracy is high (0.97), models miss a large proportion of necessary escalations (32–97%) under uncertainty, and even the largest 9.7B model’s performance drops to 0.78 in conflict scenarios. A workflow-aware controller improves utility and reduces missed escalations, but its effectiveness is limited by lexical generalization failures.

By Zihao Zheng (Washington University in St. Louis), Junyi Yao (Washington University in St. Louis), Baichuan Li (Southern Methodist University), Jiayu Long (Washington University in St. Louis)
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Learning When to Withdraw: Curriculum Coverage and Rule-Specific Failures in Fine-Tuned Language Agents

The paper investigates how fine‑tuned language agents can selectively withdraw actions when evidence changes or authority is revoked. Using a synthetic NAQD‑Env environment, the authors compare an original curriculum with an enriched one across multiple system‑prompt framings and evaluate four LoRA checkpoints of Qwen2.5‑3B‑Instruct against instruction‑tuned baselines. Results show that fine‑tuned checkpoints achieve higher decision agreement and withdrawal recall, reduce incorrect withdrawals, and narrow prohibited combinations, though they also omit valid event reports and exhibit mixed preservation of authorized actions.

By Mohamed Abouzahra
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Explicit State Elicitation Is Not Enough: A Controlled Audit of Memory-Policy Classification

The paper investigates how personalized agents decide to use, ignore, update, or query retrieved user memory before acting on a task. An empirical audit protocol is developed to test structured intermediate outputs, revealing that while exposing state definitions improves accuracy, an explicit state-output field does not significantly enhance policy accuracy for large language models. The study also shows that example-level accuracy overstates consistency, with full four‑way family success being rare, and that providing benchmark‑associated state labels merely conditions predictions rather than proving internal fidelity.

By Yihang Chen, Pin Qian, Su Wang, Chong Peng, Huan Xu, Shuaiting Li, Yiqi Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Mitigating Fabrication in Multi-Stage LLM Pipelines for Hiring: An Empirical Evaluation of Prompt Guardrails and Human-in-the-Loop Checkpoints

The study evaluates how to reduce fabricated claims in multi‑stage large language model (LLM) hiring pipelines. Prompt guardrails alone cut fabrication density by 86 % but still left half of outputs containing false claims, while adding a human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoint after resume improvement eliminated all identity fabrications and significantly lowered overall fabrication rates. The results show that a layered approach—combining prompt guardrails with human checkpoints—provides stronger protection against severe failures without harming the quality of the final outputs.

By Hiroko Takano
arXiv AI
Sep 25

TWIST: A Proposed Benchmark for Intervention Quality in Conversational Memory, with a Human-Validated Draft-Alignment

TWIST is a new benchmark suite designed to evaluate the quality of interventions in conversational memory systems, focusing on how well these systems act correctly at belief change points. It includes four tracks—tension detection, draft vetting, belief-consistent answering, and sensitive recall governance—each paired with hard-negative controls to prevent gaming. The benchmark is rigorously validated through double annotation, adjudication, and a separability audit, revealing that current models face trade-offs between contradiction recall and false-positive rates.

By Subrat Panda
arXiv AI
3d ago

The More the Better? A Comparison of Single- and Multi-Agent LLM Setups on a Financial Review Task

The study compares single-agent and multi-agent large language model (LLM) setups for reviewing credit assessment memos against specified requirements. In a controlled experiment with 300 synthetic memos, a single agent examined six requirements in one call, while a team of three agents each checked two requirements. Results show the team identified 0.08 to 0.10 more defects on certain models but also produced more false alarms, used 2.2 to 2.4 times more tokens, and had mixed effects on balanced accuracy depending on instruction and model.

By Pei Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

From Trajectories to Evidence: Auditable Experimental Records for Industrial Research Agents

arXiv:2608. 05235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions.

By Zijie Zhuang, Changxin Lao, Pengbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Ruochen Yang, Yingzhi He, Peng Zhang, Jiangxia Cao, Yusheng Huang, Guohong Mu, Jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Shuang Yang, Zhaojie Liu, Wenwu Ou, Kun Gai