arXiv AI By Zengqing Wu, Chuan Xiao

Proxy reliance in large language model decisions is uncalibrated to predictive evidence

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arXiv AI
Sep 2

Medical Causal Hypothesis Verification with Large Language Models

The paper "Medical Causal Hypothesis Verification with Large Language Models" reports a small-scale study evaluating eight LLMs on 17 medical causal hypotheses. The authors introduce an evaluation framework and annotate 1,067 evidence points across six criteria, using nine metrics to assess performance. Results show that while LLMs have strong recall, they frequently fail to provide valid scientific articles, evidence, or reject unsupported hypotheses, revealing a critical limitation for their use in healthcare.

By Safiyyah Ahmed, Abrar Ansari, Md Aminul Islam, Elena Zheleva
arXiv AI
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From Causal Plausibility to Causal Reliability: Evaluating LLMs as Calibrated Direct Causal-Edge Classifiers

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By Amit Kumar, Elnur Adl Zarabi, Suranjana Trivedy, Zhiqian Chen, Lei Zhang, Kaiqun Fu, Taoran Ji
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Aligning Language Models with Observational Data: Opportunities and Risks from a Causal Perspective

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
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Beyond the Name: Demographic Leakage in De-Identified R\'esum\'es and Evaluation Artifacts in LLM Bias Audits

The paper examines whether removing declared language fields from de‑identified résumés eliminates demographic leakage in large language models. By keeping language attributes identical and varying only unstructured prose across five ethnocultural groups and three cue‑salience levels, the authors find that non‑language text still allows target‑group recovery (average 0.757, reaching 1.000 under high salience). They also show that evaluation design—such as allowing or forbidding ties—dramatically affects LLM‑as‑a‑judge outcomes, underscoring the importance of evaluation protocol in bias audits.

By Qiangju Chen, Yang Xiao