arXiv AI

Whose Name Comes Up? II: Benchmarking and Intervention-Based Auditing of LLM-Based Scholar Recommendation

arXiv:2602. 08873v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are now used for academic expert recommendation.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

MERIT: Matching Expertise via Rubric-Informed Training for Reviewer Assignment

MERIT is a two‑stage framework for reviewer assignment that first trains a reviewer assessor using reinforcement learning to match paper‑specific expertise rubrics with reviewers’ prior work, guided by an LLM judge. The assessor’s predictions are then distilled into an embedding‑based retriever for efficient large‑scale assignment. Experiments show the 4B assessor outperforms larger general‑purpose LLMs on suitability classification, and the retriever achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LR‑Bench and the CMU Gold dataset.

By Zixuan Yang, Yibo Zhao, Weicong Liu, Xiang Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

IDEAlign: Comparing Ideas of Large Language Models to Domain Expert

IDEAlign introduces a new protocol for evaluating the similarity of large language model (LLM) annotations to expert judgments. It uses pick‑the‑odd‑one‑out tasks to capture expert similarity and benchmarks various similarity methods—including text embeddings, topic models, and LLM-as-a-judge—against these human ratings. Applied to educational datasets, the study finds that most metrics miss nuanced expert dimensions, with LLM-as-a-judge performing best yet still insufficient for full expert alignment.

By Hyunji Nam, Lucia Langlois, James Malamut, Mei Tan, Dorottya Demszky
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Do LLMs Know a Good Hypothesis When They See One? Logit-Based Energy Scoring Outperforms Prompted LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Hypothesis Ranking

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably assess scientific hypotheses by using a logit-based energy scoring method that leverages the model’s intrinsic confidence. Across 1,323 papers in 12 disciplines, this intrinsic scoring achieved a 33.0% Hit@1 rate, outperforming a prompted listwise ranking approach that scored 16.6%. The best result, a 1‑billion‑parameter model with logit-based energy scoring, reached 53.1% Hit@1, suggesting that confidence‑based evaluation could improve trustworthy AI‑enabled scientific discovery.

By Swati Rajwal, Sanjay Das, Tirthankar Ghosal
arXiv AI
Sep 2

RPCBench: A Benchmark for Proactive Premise Critique in LLM-based Recommendation

RPCBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large language models’ ability to critique recommendation requests by detecting, diagnosing, and handling flawed premises. It includes evidence‑grounded test instances across five recommendation domains and ten types of premise failures, and introduces a fine‑grained evaluation framework covering detection, error localization, handling strategy, and evidence faithfulness. Experiments with 11 LLMs reveal that proactive detection is the main bottleneck, with models struggling most on underspecified‑premise errors and showing that optimal critique quality occurs at intermediate reasoning lengths.

By Zhongru Chen, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

The Utility of LLMs in Recommender Systems Explanation Evaluation

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) can evaluate explanations in recommender systems. It generates 18 explanation prototypes and has 14 LLMs rate them, comparing the results to human ratings from a user study. Findings show that while LLMs mimic human rating patterns and correlate moderately with human judgments, their absolute agreement is low and varies with model size and evaluation design, leading to four practical recommendations for using LLMs in this context.

By Kathrin Wardatzky, Oana Inel, Luca Rossetto, Abraham Bernstein
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Safety as a Constraint: Fine-Tuning a LLM Recommender to Explain Itself

The paper presents a method for fine‑tuning a large language model (LLM) recommender to generate personalized, non‑harmful explanations for its recommendations. By training two LLM‑judge reward models and using constrained GRPO, the authors achieve a significant increase in the PASS rate for all three criteria, from 0.649 to 0.956 on their own judges and from 0.677 to 0.931 on an independent judge. The fine‑tuned model maintains its original recommendation performance, demonstrating that LLM‑based recommenders can be adapted to complex tasks without loss of effectiveness.

By Jiashu He, Emma Yanyang Kong, JJ Tan, David Fagnan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

When AI Reviews Train AI Reviewers: Scientific-Judgment Collapse and Mitigation

Large language models are increasingly used as automated reviewers in scientific evaluation, creating a recursive feedback loop where later reviewers learn from earlier model-generated judgments. A study using Llama 3.1 8B fine‑tuned on ICLR reviews shows that incorporating synthetic reviews compresses rating distributions and reduces semantic diversity, a phenomenon termed scientific‑judgment collapse. To counter this, the authors introduce TrustReviewer, an open‑source LLM system that curates training data and applies paired activation steering at test time to preserve judgment diversity and improve recommendation alignment.

By Sy-Tuyen Ho, Minghui Liu, Furong Huang