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arXiv AI By Carole Lunny, Ian Goodman, Stefano Berrone, Connor TA Brenna, Emma K Reid, Ivan Perez-Neri, Shailesh Kolekar, Nityanand Jain, Ashwin Kamath, Lucas HCC Santos, Yulia Otmakhova, Heba Hussein, Diana M Cespedes, Gioia Dahdal, Salmaan Kanji

When the Same Prompt Gives Different Answers (and the Same Answer Isn't Always Right): A Taxonomy of Failure Mechanisms, Testing, and Mitigation Strategies for LLM-Assisted Evidence Synthesis Read-and-Evaluate Tasks

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The paper introduces TRAILS, a taxonomy of 38 mechanisms that can compromise the reliability of large language model (LLM) read‑and‑evaluate tasks in evidence synthesis, such as study screening, data extraction, risk‑of‑bias assessment, and critical appraisal. It explains how these mechanisms can cause inconsistent or hidden failures across repeated LLM runs and outlines deployment settings, testing approaches, and mitigation strategies for each. The authors argue that repeatability or accuracy alone does not guarantee trustworthy judgments, emphasizing the need for human evaluation to verify that decisions are evidence‑based, free from external influence, and reproducible.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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When the Same Prompt Gives Different Answers (and the Same Answer Isn't Always Right): A Taxonomy of Failure Mechanisms, Testing, and Mitigation Strategies for LLM-Assisted Evidence Synthesis Read-and-Evaluate Tasks

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