Small language models can grade open‑ended exam answers as reliably as much larger models when they use an explicit rubric. In experiments with six cost‑efficient model configurations, the rubric decouples grading from judge intelligence, with answer identity explaining 95.6% of score variance and judge identity only 0.2%. Removing rubric criteria or the official answer collapses reliability and inflates scores, showing the rubric’s essential role.
By Jhen-Ke Lin
arXiv:2608. 16045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based data-analysis tools are increasingly used to help users analyze messy spreadsheets and workbooks, from answering questions over uploaded files to generating code, summaries, and visualizations.
By Yike Yuan, Virum Ranka, Tina Lasisi, Lin Ma
The study evaluates large language model (LLM) graders on two computer‑science exams, testing 171 configurations of closed‑ and open‑weights models. While the best LLM configuration achieved a mean absolute error of 1.64/35—better than the 2.61/35 error between two human graders—its performance was highly sensitive to the prompt. A short "strict grader" preamble caused most open‑weight models to exceed acceptable error thresholds or stop grading entirely, whereas fine‑tuning with a single LoRA adapter restored parity with human graders and reduced sensitivity to harsh prompts.
By Ali Habibullah, Yazan Alshoibi, Mohammad Alshiekh, Salman Khan, Naeemullah Khan
arXiv:2605. 22664v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions.
By Thomson Yen, Julian Poeltl, Harshith Srinivas Gear, Yilin Meng, Joshua Fan, Adam Shen, Yili Liu, Ali Bauyrzhan, Siri Du, Haoyang Liu, Daniel Guetta, Hongseok Namkoong
arXiv:2606. 23767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Headline accuracies on the Tuebingen cause-effect pairs are routinely compared across papers even though each is measured under its authors' own protocol -- different pair subsets, weightings, model-selection, and decision rates.
By Wietse Stienstra
arXiv:2606. 10457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision rules that enterprise experts apply tacitly -- in auditing, compliance, and contract review -- can be systematically recovered and improved through iterative error analysis.
By Junli Zha, Jinbo Wang, Chao Zhou, Xiang Song