arXiv AI

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606. 13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

The Reasoning Tax: Token Economics of LLM Reasoning Across Task Types and Deployment Contexts

The paper introduces the Token Economy Score (TES), a metric that quantifies the accuracy gain of reasoning-capable large language models relative to non-reasoning baselines, normalized by token generation cost. An empirical study across 151 runs on seven diverse benchmarks shows that task structure—such as sequential inference chains—predicts higher TES, while knowledge-recall tasks yield lower TES despite difficulty. The analysis also reveals diminishing returns at higher reasoning effort and highlights how deployment context, via Reasoning Cost Share and Deployment Cost Multiplier, can alter the economic viability of reasoning workloads.

By Sachin Gopal Wani, Ajay Dholakia, David Ellison
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

FinRiskAtlas: Decision-Aligned Evaluation of Large Language Models for Financial Risk Review

FinRiskAtlas is a Chinese-language benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) for financial risk review by focusing on decision‑aligned tasks rather than generic financial knowledge. It contains 9,742 instances across 53 task families, including 42 domain‑knowledge families and 11 downstream review operations defined by explicit evaluation contracts. The extended FinRisk‑Ask framework replays 680 pre‑action states from 104 professional trajectories, withholding future evidence during inference to assess evidence‑state control and request targeting. Results across 33 model configurations show that operation‑level evaluation yields distinct rankings and that knowledge‑based shortlisting can incur significant regret, while frequent use of the Ask branch does not necessarily improve evidence acquisition, highlighting gaps in broad financial capability scores.

By Suyang Zhong, Jingzhe Zhu, Qi Xu, Liyao Sun, Yin Wang, Qingqing Sun, Shuai Chen, Tianyi Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Rethinking Verbalized Confidence for LLM-as-a-Judge: A Compatibility Shift on Post-2025 Proprietary Models

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 AI
Sep 15

Empirical Evaluation of Open-Source Large Language Models for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in ESG Domain

The paper evaluates seven open‑source large language models for retrieval‑augmented generation in the ESG reporting domain, using 498 real‑world ESG reports from EU‑listed companies and 100 synthetic QA pairs. Performance is measured with RAGAS metrics, showing strong retrieval scores but variable generation quality, especially in faithfulness and factual correctness. The results highlight significant differences across model architectures and underscore the need for domain‑specific fine‑tuning to improve factual accuracy.

By Motaz Saad, Anna Borrelli, Ivan Gentile, Kianna Kazemi, Francesco Piccialli, Antonella Longo
arXiv AI
Jun 26

Narration-of-Thought: Inference-Time Scaffolding for Defeasible Ethical Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 26366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard chain-of-thought on moral dilemmas exhibits two failure modes: stakeholder collapse (the trace names at most one party with a stake in the outcome) and uncertainty suppression (no explicit unknowns or hedges before committing to an action).

By Patrick Cooper, Alvaro Velasquez
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Rethinking Reward Models for Multi-Domain Test-Time Scaling

arXiv:2510. 00492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reliability of large language models (LLMs) during test-time scaling is often assessed with \emph{external verifiers} or \emph{reward models} that distinguish correct reasoning from flawed logic.

By Dong Bok Lee, Seanie Lee, Sangwoo Park, Minki Kang, Jinheon Baek, Dongki Kim, Dominik Wagner, Jiongdao Jin, Heejun Lee, Tobias Bocklet, Jinyu Wang, Jingjing Fu, Sung Ju Hwang, Jiang Bian, Lei Song
arXiv AI
Aug 17

The Metacognitive Bottleneck: Japanese Riddles Reveal Fundamental Limits of Machine Insight and Self-Evaluation in Reasoning AI

arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.

By Masaharu Mizumoto, Dat Nguyen, Zhiheng Han, Xingfu Li, Yo Nakawake, Le Minh Nguyen
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Reproducing and Stress-Testing Two Approaches to LLM Reasoning Reliability: Test-Time Probability Aggregation and Logic-Representation Editing

arXiv:2608. 08514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We independently reproduce two recent methods for making large language model (LLM) reasoning more reliable, and stress-test them across domains and models (RPC across four new task domains with Qwen3-8B, LCF across four 7-8B models).

By Minhan Cho, Jimin Kweon