arXiv Computation and Language

Grounded Normative Rule Generation with Structured Search

The paper introduces Grounded Normative Rule Generation (GNRS) and a new framework called GNRS-Search that uses Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling to optimize a discrete And-Or Graph for rule synthesis. By separating operational feasibility from prose generation, the method localizes rule failures before final text creation. Evaluations on GNRS-Bench and RealCharter-Bench show significant improvements in rubric quality and executable metrics, demonstrating that the gains come from robust operational logic rather than stylistic tuning.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Tasks over Application Manuals: Revealing Gaps in Long-Horizon Procedural Reasoning for Language Models

The paper introduces Tasks over Application Manuals (TAM), a benchmark designed to test long‑horizon procedural reasoning in large language models. TAM uses real‑world tasks from ICD‑10‑CM clinical coding and U.S. federal sentencing, requiring models to follow extensive, rule‑based manuals and perform interdependent steps to produce exact answers. Experiments with GPT‑5 and various prompting strategies show very low exact‑match accuracy—1% for coding and 15.5% for sentencing—highlighting a gap between current benchmarks and the ability to reliably follow complex procedures.

By Utkarsh Soni, Syed Shariyar Murtaza, Yifan Nie, Sachin Chandrasekhar, Eugene Wen
arXiv AI
Jun 9

From Statute to Control Flow: Span-Grounded Deontic Trees for Defeasible Scope Parsing

arXiv:2606. 08932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rule-following agents tasked with executing policies and regulations often fail via Silent Scope Omission (SSO): a model applies a general rule but silently drops nested exceptions or counter-exceptions, producing outputs that appear compliant yet break on important edge cases.

By Jian Chen, Siyuan Li, Chucheng Wan, Zixuan Yuan
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Who Holds the Pen? Let Specifications, Not Agents, Sign Off

The paper argues that large language model agents should not be the sole authority on whether they have satisfied a task. It identifies two gaps—understanding–execution and state–authority—where agents may claim completion without actually meeting the specification. The authors propose SpecHarness, a framework that separates agent proposals from authoritative state by requiring evidence from qualified providers to confirm compliance, and demonstrate its effectiveness on guideline‑following and artifact‑generation tasks.

By Haiqing Li, Xin Ma, Yinhao Wu, Wenliang Zhong, Feng Jiang, Thao M. Dang, Xiao Hu, Hehuan Ma, Yuzhi Guo, Junzhou Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Agent Gym: A Framework for Continuous Evaluation and Evolution of LLM Agents Through Human-in-the-Loop Feedback

arXiv:2608. 15591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents deployed in production environments face a fundamental tension: the agent's behavior is frozen at deployment time, while the business rules and edge cases it must handle continue to evolve.

By Pouya Ghiasnezhad Omran, Michael Zimmermann, Duncan Cambridge, Ashmita Kapoor, Tanya Dixit
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Automated Regulatory Compliance Question Answering in Financial Services with Domain-Adapted Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper presents a retrieval‑augmented generation pipeline for answering regulatory compliance questions in finance. It builds a three‑stage retriever on LegalBERT and a compact 2B–12B generator served with 4‑bit quantization, achieving a Recall@10 of 0.774 on the ObliQA benchmark and improving answer quality via RAFT‑LoRA fine‑tuning. However, the adapted models fail to transfer to Australian case‑law questions, and a closed‑book model performs almost as well while lacking verifiable grounding.

By Tobias Deu{\ss}er, Abhishek Pillai, Aurelio F. Bariviera, Dhananjay Bhardwaj, Lorenz Sparrenberg, David Berghaus, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa