new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Nov 4

NumTrace: Auditing the Number Provenance of Financial Analyst Agents

A numerical claim generated by a financial analyst agent can match a number in a company filing but refer to the wrong entity, concept, period, unit or scope. A check based on reference answers can mark such an answer as wrong but does not explain why it fails. In this paper, we present NumTrace, a new benchmark that audits the provenance of each numerical claim made by financial analyst agents: its source and financial semantics. NumTrace currently has 540 questions over 2,163 SEC EDGAR documents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first numerical benchmark about who holds a company's shares (Form 13F) and what its executives are owed (Item 402(i)). On a frozen snapshot of these documents, we build the reference answers according to accounting rules. NumTrace then gives each claim three separate verdicts: value, binding and support. By retaining separate value and binding verdicts, NumTrace detects right number, wrong account (RNWA) errors: a claim has an RNWA error when it passes the value check but fails the binding check. The RNWA rate quantifies the gap between value-only and joint value-and-binding pass rates. Finally, we audit three agents, Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash. RNWA errors make up 67.5-81.8% of each agent's failing claims. In particular, on 13F co-filing group questions, about 91% of claims pass the value check, but fewer than half pass the binding check.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 25

Robust Tool Use via Fission-GRPO: Learning to Recover from Execution Errors

Large language models (LLMs) can call tools effectively, yet they remain brittle in multi-turn execution: following a tool call error, smaller models often degenerate into repetitive invalid re-invocations, failing to interpret error feedback and self-correct. This brittleness hinders reliable real-world deployment, where the execution errors are inherently inevitable during tool interaction procedures. We identify a key limitation of current approaches: standard reinforcement learning (RL) treats errors as sparse negative rewards, providing no guidance on how to recover, while pre-collected synthetic error-correction datasets suffer from distribution mismatch with the model's on-policy error modes. To bridge this gap, we propose Fission-GRPO, a framework that converts execution errors into corrective supervision within the RL training loop. Our core mechanism fissions each failed trajectory into a new training instance by augmenting it with diagnostic feedback from a finetuned Error Simulator, then resampling recovery rollouts on-policy. This enables the model to learn from the precise errors it makes during exploration, rather than from static, pre-collected error cases. On the BFCL v4 Multi-Turn, Fission-GRPO improves the error recovery rate of Qwen3-8B by 5.7% absolute, crucially, yielding a 4% overall accuracy gain (42.75% to 46.75%) over GRPO and outperforming specialized tool-use agents.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 21 2

Evaluating LLMs at Detecting Errors in LLM Responses

With Large Language Models (LLMs) being widely used across various tasks, detecting errors in their responses is increasingly crucial. However, little research has been conducted on error detection of LLM responses. Collecting error annotations on LLM responses is challenging due to the subjective nature of many NLP tasks, and thus previous research focuses on tasks of little practical value (e.g., word sorting) or limited error types (e.g., faithfulness in summarization). This work introduces ReaLMistake, the first error detection benchmark consisting of objective, realistic, and diverse errors made by LLMs. ReaLMistake contains three challenging and meaningful tasks that introduce objectively assessable errors in four categories (reasoning correctness, instruction-following, context-faithfulness, and parameterized knowledge), eliciting naturally observed and diverse errors in responses of GPT-4 and Llama 2 70B annotated by experts. We use ReaLMistake to evaluate error detectors based on 12 LLMs. Our findings show: 1) Top LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 3 detect errors made by LLMs at very low recall, and all LLM-based error detectors perform much worse than humans. 2) Explanations by LLM-based error detectors lack reliability. 3) LLMs-based error detection is sensitive to small changes in prompts but remains challenging to improve. 4) Popular approaches to improving LLMs, including self-consistency and majority vote, do not improve the error detection performance. Our benchmark and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/ReaLMistake.

  • 15 authors
·
Apr 4, 2024

IndustryBench: Probing the Industrial Knowledge Boundaries of LLMs

In industrial procurement, an LLM answer is useful only if it survives a standards check: recommended material must match operating condition, every parameter must respect a regulated threshold, and no procedure may contradict a safety clause. Partial correctness can mask safety-critical contradictions that aggregate LLM benchmarks rarely capture. We introduce IndustryBench, a 2,049-item benchmark for industrial procurement QA in Chinese, grounded in Chinese national standards (GB/T) and structured industrial product records, organized by seven capability dimensions, ten industry categories, and panel-derived difficulty tiers, with item-aligned English, Russian, and Vietnamese renderings. Our construction pipeline rejects 70.3% of LLM-generated candidates at a search-based external-verification stage, calibrating how unreliable industrial QA remains after LLM-only filtering.Our evaluation decouples raw correctness, scored by a Qwen3-Max judge validated at κ_w = 0.798 against a domain expert, from a separate safety-violation (SV) check against source texts. Across 17 models in Chinese and an 8-model intersection over four languages, we find: (i) the best system reaches only 2.083 on the 0--3 rubric, leaving substantial headroom; (ii) Standards & Terminology is the most persistent capability weakness and survives item-aligned translation; (iii) extended reasoning lowers safety-adjusted scores for 12 of 13 models, primarily by introducing unsupported safety-critical details into longer final answers; and (iv) safety-violation rates reshuffle the leaderboard -- GPT-5.4 climbs from rank 6 to rank 3 after SV adjustment, while Kimi-k2.5-1T-A32B drops seven positions.Industrial LLM evaluation therefore requires source-grounded, safety-aware diagnosis rather than aggregate accuracy. We release IndustryBench with all prompts, scoring scripts, and dataset documentation.

False Floors: LLM Safety Routing Evaluations Break Under Distribution Shift

Safety routers send each request to one of several models and are judged against the best single model. A major routing benchmark picks that comparator on the evaluation data. In the benchmark's own setting this is harmless, but under distribution shift it is not. On HELM Safety the selection cost is 0.003-0.030 of harm under random splits and 0.045-0.113 under held-out categories, comparable to the whole deficit attributed to routing, with its direction holding under either published judge alone. It rises seven- to ninefold on AgentDojo when suites are held out. Across seven safety corpora chosen by rules fixed in advance, three meet a registered interval test and four beat a later permutation null, and three of the four interval misses are corpora where some models have zero observed harm. Prior work proves the direction of this bias. We size it on harm and accuracy, show that it is larger under the held-out splits we measure, and bound it by optimism plus a shift-dependent regret. Scored honestly under shift, routing buys little on these benchmarks. In most pool cells the nested router serves the honest baseline's model, and on the nearly saturated AgentDojo corpus a perfect pre-dispatch router is worth at most two points of harm. We also find a model's expressed recognition of a late injection steerable. On held-out reruns an attacker who knows which model it faces lowers GPT-5.4's judged recognition by 19.6 points, confirmed by an independent label. In an offline counterfactual composition into a controller, the same attack raises or lowers estimated harm depending on the fallback model. Safety routing should be evaluated under shift, against a baseline chosen without the test labels, and recognition-based defences should be scored on harm against an attacker who chooses what the model sees.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 30