The study investigates how prior scores influence large language model (LLM) judgments in the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. By testing three prompt conditions—no metadata, revision framing, and anchored metadata containing prior scores—the authors find that prior scores systematically bias evaluations, shifting ratings toward those scores across 192,000 attempts. The bias also affects categorical decisions, blocking 48% of error corrections and flipping 10.18% of correct judgments, and is not mitigated by Chain-of-Thought or a warning, underscoring the need for careful context engineering.
By Ante Kapetanovic, Kemal Altwlkany, Andro Mercep, Tomislav Duricic, Emanuel Lacic
arXiv:2607. 14174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial sentiment extraction has largely relied on news text and supervised extraction against return labels alone, leaving 10-K filings -- and volatility, the target risk disclosure is arguably best suited to informing -- comparatively unexplored.
By Sanggyu Sean Choi
The paper discusses how large language models (LLMs) can be fine‑tuned with observational data to improve alignment with human preferences and business goals. It highlights that directly using such data can cause models to learn spurious correlations, and introduces DeconfoundLM, a method that removes known confounders from reward signals. Experiments show that DeconfoundLM better recovers causal relationships and outperforms baseline methods by over 16% in objective score when confounding is present.
By Erfan Loghmani
The study examines whether financial sentiment tools that are validated against human labels also reliably predict market outcomes. Using a large corpus of securities class action messages linked to abnormal stock returns, the authors compare five sentiment instruments—VADER, Loughran‑McDonald, FinBERT, Twitter‑RoBERTa, and an LLM annotator—within a single pipeline. Results show that the alignment between human agreement and sentiment scores varies with sampling strategy and time horizon: conventional sampling favors same‑day associations, while fixed‑n panels yield similar correlations for both same‑day and one‑day‑ahead predictions, yet overall predictive rankings remain weak.
By AS Aravinthkakshan, Laven Srivastava, Harsh Nandwani
The paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating large language models on trustworthy analysis of earnings call transcripts. It proposes a numeric evidence evaluation method that assesses groundedness without expert annotation, and presents an automated pipeline that builds the ECTs-100 dataset from the top 100 S&P 500 constituents. The study also explores the failure mode of conscious incompetence, where models must recognize insufficient evidence and avoid hallucinations, finding that while groundedness is strong, correctness remains a challenge.
By Yingzhu Zhao, Vlad Pandelea, Han Yuan, Bo Hu, Wuqiong Luo, Li Zhang, Zheng Ma
Large language models are increasingly used as decision aids whose probability judgments shape downstream choices. Whether those judgments carry a systematic directional tilt has been hard to detect: calibration metrics aggregate unsigned errors, and naturalistic uncertainty offers no ground-truth probability.
The paper argues that verbalized confidence—once viewed as overconfident and coarse—has become the preferred soft‑scoring method for LLM‑as‑a‑Judge on top‑tier proprietary models released after 2025. Experiments on SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2 across up to 18 LLMs show that log‑probabilities are no longer the best signal, and that adding an overconfidence advisory and self‑debate further improves calibration and robustness. The authors note that these enhancements incur little accuracy loss on post‑2025 models but do affect pre‑2025 ones, highlighting a compatibility shift in how confidence should be measured.
By Yu-Chung Hsiao
arXiv:2608.28626v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate peer reviews, prompting examination of their capacity for critical evaluation. This st...
By Emad Alharbi
The paper evaluates twelve financial sentiment models—including dictionary-based methods, finance-specific transformers, and open-source large language models—using linguistic and economic validity criteria. General-purpose LLMs match finance-specific transformers in classification performance but do not yield stronger economic relationships. While several models correlate with earnings surprises, none shows a significant link to next‑day stock returns, and performance is strongest for large earnings beats or misses.
By Arslan Bisharat, Oudom Hean
The paper "What Do We Expect from LLMs? Mapping the Design of LLM Benchmarks" analyzes 14,767 arXiv submissions from 2022 to 2026 that introduce or update evaluation resources for large language models. It systematically maps changes in target systems, domains, evaluation materials, conditions, and scoring mechanisms, revealing a growing emphasis on action, interaction, and professional applications. The study also notes uneven development in model participation, with LLM-based scoring increasing in both agent and non-agent groups, while model-generated materials do not show a comparable rise.
By Chao Wang (Independent Researcher)
The paper examines whether human agreement and return association can be used interchangeably as criteria for validating sentiment tools in financial NLP. Using a large corpus of securities class action messages linked to abnormal stock returns, the authors compare five sentiment instruments and find that the relationship between human agreement and predictive validity varies with sampling conventions and score representations. They conclude that benchmark agreement establishes semantic validity but does not guarantee predictive rankings, and that message volume in a spam‑heavy conversation does not predict market damage or settlement size.
By AS Aravinthakshan, Laven Srivastava, Harsh Nandwani
arXiv:2606. 26130v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to guide research methodology, yet their default methodological tendencies under minimal prompting remain unclear.
By Francesca Carlon, Brecht Verbeken, Vincent Ginis, Andres Algaba