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SubscribeSystematic Diagnosis of Brittle Reasoning in Large Language Models
A central question in artificial intelligence is the extent to which machine learning models comprehend mathematics. To address this, we propose a novel framework for measuring mathematical reasoning that moves beyond standard benchmarks to diagnose specific failure points. Our method first generates structured, step-by-step reasoning from gpt-3.5-turbo on the GSM8K dataset. We then use a more capable analyst model, gpt-4o-mini, to categorize errors and, crucially, perform an unsupervised clustering of every reasoning sentence to identify emergent "reasoning modes." This analysis reveals a cognitive profile with a stark, nonhuman-like brittleness: while the model achieves near-perfect accuracy on procedural modes like sequential calculation, its performance on modes requiring combinatorial reasoning with restrictions plummets. By identifying and quantifying the reliability of these distinct reasoning skills, our work provides a more granular method to evaluate mathematical comprehension and offers a precise roadmap for developing new capabilities and more reliable future applications.
MedSPOT: A Workflow-Aware Sequential Grounding Benchmark for Clinical GUI
Despite the rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their ability to perform reliable visual grounding in high-stakes clinical software environments remains underexplored. Existing GUI benchmarks largely focus on isolated, single-step grounding queries, overlooking the sequential, workflow-driven reasoning required in real-world medical interfaces, where tasks evolve across independent steps and dynamic interface states. We introduce MedSPOT, a workflow-aware sequential grounding benchmark for clinical GUI environments. Unlike prior benchmarks that treat grounding as a standalone prediction task, MedSPOT models procedural interaction as a sequence of structured spatial decisions. The benchmark comprises 216 task-driven videos with 597 annotated keyframes, in which each task consists of 2 to 3 interdependent grounding steps within realistic medical workflows. This design captures interface hierarchies, contextual dependencies, and fine-grained spatial precision under evolving conditions. To evaluate procedural robustness, we propose a strict sequential evaluation protocol that terminates task assessment upon the first incorrect grounding prediction, explicitly measuring error propagation in multi-step workflows. We further introduce a comprehensive failure taxonomy, including edge bias, small-target errors, no prediction, near miss, far miss, and toolbar confusion, to enable systematic diagnosis of model behavior in clinical GUI settings. By shifting evaluation from isolated grounding to workflow-aware sequential reasoning, MedSPOT establishes a realistic and safety-critical benchmark for assessing multimodal models in medical software environments. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Tajamul21/MedSPOT.
DR.BENCH: Diagnostic Reasoning Benchmark for Clinical Natural Language Processing
The meaningful use of electronic health records (EHR) continues to progress in the digital era with clinical decision support systems augmented by artificial intelligence. A priority in improving provider experience is to overcome information overload and reduce the cognitive burden so fewer medical errors and cognitive biases are introduced during patient care. One major type of medical error is diagnostic error due to systematic or predictable errors in judgment that rely on heuristics. The potential for clinical natural language processing (cNLP) to model diagnostic reasoning in humans with forward reasoning from data to diagnosis and potentially reduce the cognitive burden and medical error has not been investigated. Existing tasks to advance the science in cNLP have largely focused on information extraction and named entity recognition through classification tasks. We introduce a novel suite of tasks coined as Diagnostic Reasoning Benchmarks, DR.BENCH, as a new benchmark for developing and evaluating cNLP models with clinical diagnostic reasoning ability. The suite includes six tasks from ten publicly available datasets addressing clinical text understanding, medical knowledge reasoning, and diagnosis generation. DR.BENCH is the first clinical suite of tasks designed to be a natural language generation framework to evaluate pre-trained language models. Experiments with state-of-the-art pre-trained generative language models using large general domain models and models that were continually trained on a medical corpus demonstrate opportunities for improvement when evaluated in DR. BENCH. We share DR. BENCH as a publicly available GitLab repository with a systematic approach to load and evaluate models for the cNLP community.
Towards Self-Improving Error Diagnosis in Multi-Agent Systems
Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) enable complex problem-solving but introduce significant debugging challenges, characterized by long interaction traces, inter-agent dependencies, and delayed error manifestation. Existing diagnostic approaches often rely on expensive expert annotation or ''LLM-as-a-judge'' paradigms, which struggle to pinpoint decisive error steps within extended contexts. In this paper, we introduce ErrorProbe, a self-improving framework for semantic failure attribution that identifies responsible agents and the originating error step. The framework operates via a three-stage pipeline: (1) operationalizing the MAS failure taxonomy to detect local anomalies, (2) performing symptom-driven backward tracing to prune irrelevant context, and (3) employing a specialized multi-agent team (Strategist, Investigator, Arbiter) to validate error hypotheses through tool-grounded execution. Crucially, ErrorProbe maintains a verified episodic memory that updates only when error patterns are confirmed by executable evidence, without the need for annotation. Experiments across the TracerTraj and Who&When benchmarks demonstrate that ErrorProbe significantly outperforms baselines, particularly in step-level localization, while the verified memory enables robust cross-domain transfer without retraining.
VeriLLMed: Interactive Visual Debugging of Medical Large Language Models with Knowledge Graphs
Large language models (LLMs) show promise in medical diagnosis, but real-world deployment remains challenging due to high-stakes clinical decisions and imperfect reasoning reliability. As a result, careful inspection of model behavior is essential for assessing whether diagnostic reasoning is reliable and clinically grounded. However, debugging medical LLMs remains difficult. First, developers often lack sufficient medical domain expertise to interpret model errors in clinically meaningful terms. Second, models can fail across a large and diverse set of instances involving different input types, tasks, and reasoning steps, making it challenging for developers to prioritize which errors deserve focused inspection. Third, developers struggle to identify recurring error patterns across cases, as existing debugging practices are largely instance-centric and rely on manual inspection of isolated failures. To address these challenges, we present VeriLLMed, a visual analytics system that integrates external biomedical knowledge to audit and debug medical LLM diagnostic reasoning. VeriLLMed transforms model outputs into comparable reasoning paths, constructs knowledge graph-grounded reference paths, and identifies three recurring classes of diagnosis errors: relation errors, branch errors, and missing errors. Case studies and expert evaluation demonstrate that VeriLLMed helps developers identify clinically implausible reasoning and generate actionable insights that can inform the improvement of medical LLMs.
Detecting Errors in a Numerical Response via any Regression Model
Noise plagues many numerical datasets, where the recorded values in the data may fail to match the true underlying values due to reasons including: erroneous sensors, data entry/processing mistakes, or imperfect human estimates. We consider general regression settings with covariates and a potentially corrupted response whose observed values may contain errors. By accounting for various uncertainties, we introduced veracity scores that distinguish between genuine errors and natural data fluctuations, conditioned on the available covariate information in the dataset. We propose a simple yet efficient filtering procedure for eliminating potential errors, and establish theoretical guarantees for our method. We also contribute a new error detection benchmark involving 5 regression datasets with real-world numerical errors (for which the true values are also known). In this benchmark and additional simulation studies, our method identifies incorrect values with better precision/recall than other approaches.
ChatHLS: Towards Systematic Design Automation and Optimization for High-Level Synthesis
High-Level Synthesis (HLS) improves IC development productivity by enabling hardware design from C-like languages. However, strict coding constraints and design-specific optimizations limit its widespread adoption. While recent efforts employ large language models (LLMs) to assist HLS design, they often struggle with synthesizability rules and directive semantics. To this end, we introduce ChatHLS, a multi-agent HLS design framework that leverages specialized LLMs for automated debugging and directive tuning. ChatHLS incorporates an adaptive error case expansion mechanism, combined with a reasoning-to-instruction analysis method to accurately diagnose HLS errors. To optimize hardware performance, it enables QoR-aware reasoning to learn the impact of HLS directives on the quality of results (QoR). Experimental results demonstrate that ChatHLS outperforms Gemini-3-pro with a 32.6% relative improvement in debugging, while achieving significant speedups across various HLS kernels and neural network accelerators. These results underscore the potential of ChatHLS for agile hardware development.
UnicEdit-10M: A Dataset and Benchmark Breaking the Scale-Quality Barrier via Unified Verification for Reasoning-Enriched Edits
With the rapid advances of powerful multimodal models such as GPT-4o, Nano Banana, and Seedream 4.0 in Image Editing, the performance gap between closed-source and open-source models is widening, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality training data and comprehensive benchmarks capable of diagnosing model weaknesses across diverse editing behaviors. Existing data construction methods face a scale-quality trade-off: human annotations are high-quality but not scalable, while automated pipelines suffer from error propagation and noise. To address this, we introduce a lightweight data pipeline that replaces multi-toolchains with an end-to-end model and a unified post-verification stage. For scalable quality control, we train a 7B dual-task expert model, Qwen-Verify, for efficient failure detection and instruction recaptioning. This pipeline yields UnicEdit-10M, a 10M-scale dataset spanning diverse basic and complex editing tasks. We also propose UnicBench, a general benchmark that extends beyond basic edits to explicitly assess spatial and knowledge-driven reasoning. To enable fine-grained diagnosis, we introduce novel metrics, including Non-edit Consistency and Reasoning Accuracy. Our analysis of mainstream models on UnicBench reveals their limitations and provides clear directions for future research.
ProJudge: A Multi-Modal Multi-Discipline Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for MLLM-based Process Judges
As multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors when solving scientific problems, evaluating the validity of their reasoning processes is critical for ensuring reliability and uncovering fine-grained model weaknesses. Since human evaluation is laborious and costly, prompting MLLMs as automated process judges has become a common practice. However, the reliability of these model-based judges remains uncertain. To address this, we introduce ProJudgeBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating abilities of MLLM-based process judges. ProJudgeBench comprises 2,400 test cases and 50,118 step-level labels, spanning four scientific disciplines with diverse difficulty levels and multi-modal content. In ProJudgeBench, each step is meticulously annotated by human experts for correctness, error type, and explanation, enabling a systematic evaluation of judges' capabilities to detect, classify and diagnose errors. Evaluation on ProJudgeBench reveals a significant performance gap between open-source and proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we further propose ProJudge-173k, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a Dynamic Dual-Phase fine-tuning strategy that encourages models to explicitly reason through problem-solving before assessing solutions. Both contributions significantly enhance the process evaluation capabilities of open-source models. All the resources will be released to foster future research of reliable multi-modal process evaluation.
LMOD: A Large Multimodal Ophthalmology Dataset and Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models
The prevalence of vision-threatening eye diseases is a significant global burden, with many cases remaining undiagnosed or diagnosed too late for effective treatment. Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have the potential to assist in understanding anatomical information, diagnosing eye diseases, and drafting interpretations and follow-up plans, thereby reducing the burden on clinicians and improving access to eye care. However, limited benchmarks are available to assess LVLMs' performance in ophthalmology-specific applications. In this study, we introduce LMOD, a large-scale multimodal ophthalmology benchmark consisting of 21,993 instances across (1) five ophthalmic imaging modalities: optical coherence tomography, color fundus photographs, scanning laser ophthalmoscopy, lens photographs, and surgical scenes; (2) free-text, demographic, and disease biomarker information; and (3) primary ophthalmology-specific applications such as anatomical information understanding, disease diagnosis, and subgroup analysis. In addition, we benchmarked 13 state-of-the-art LVLM representatives from closed-source, open-source, and medical domains. The results demonstrate a significant performance drop for LVLMs in ophthalmology compared to other domains. Systematic error analysis further identified six major failure modes: misclassification, failure to abstain, inconsistent reasoning, hallucination, assertions without justification, and lack of domain-specific knowledge. In contrast, supervised neural networks specifically trained on these tasks as baselines demonstrated high accuracy. These findings underscore the pressing need for benchmarks in the development and validation of ophthalmology-specific LVLMs.
Error Classification of Large Language Models on Math Word Problems: A Dynamically Adaptive Framework
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains. Math Word Problems (MWPs) serve as a crucial benchmark for evaluating LLMs' reasoning abilities. While most research primarily focuses on improving accuracy, it often neglects understanding and addressing the underlying patterns of errors. Current error classification methods rely on static and predefined categories, which limit their ability to capture the full spectrum of error patterns in mathematical reasoning. To enable systematic error analysis, we collect error samples from 15 different LLMs of varying sizes across four distinct MWP datasets using multiple sampling strategies. Based on this extensive collection, we introduce MWPES-300K, a comprehensive dataset containing 304,865 error samples that cover diverse error patterns and reasoning paths. To reduce human bias and enable fine-grained analysis of error patterns, we propose a novel framework for automated dynamic error classification in mathematical reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that dataset characteristics significantly shape error patterns, which evolve from basic to complex manifestations as model capabilities increase. With deeper insights into error patterns, we propose error-aware prompting that incorporates common error patterns as explicit guidance, leading to significant improvements in mathematical reasoning performance.
Hide and Seek with LLMs: An Adversarial Game for Sneaky Error Generation and Self-Improving Diagnosis
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation across domains, but still struggle with identifying and diagnosing complex errors. This stems mainly from training objectives that prioritize correct answers, limiting exposure to and learning from errors. While recent studies have begun to address this by introducing error signals, most rely on shallow, static errors, restricting improvement in deep diagnostic ability. To overcome this, we propose Hide and Seek Game (HSG), a dynamic adversarial framework for error generation and diagnosis, and evaluate it on mathematical problem-solving. HSG involves two adversarial roles: Sneaky, which "hides" by generating subtle, deceptive reasoning errors, and Diagnosis, which "seeks" to accurately detect them. Through adversarial co-evolution, both error stealth and diagnostic precision are enhanced. Experiments on several math reasoning tasks show that HSG significantly boosts error diagnosis, achieving 16.8\%--31.4\% higher accuracy than baselines like GPT-4o. We also release a challenging dataset of deceptive errors and diagnostic annotations as a benchmark for future research.
MSDiagnosis: An EMR-based Dataset for Clinical Multi-Step Diagnosis
Clinical diagnosis is critical in medical practice, typically requiring a continuous and evolving process that includes primary diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and final diagnosis. However, most existing clinical diagnostic tasks are single-step processes, which does not align with the complex multi-step diagnostic procedures found in real-world clinical settings. In this paper, we propose a multi-step diagnostic task and annotate a clinical diagnostic dataset (MSDiagnosis). This dataset includes primary diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and final diagnosis questions. Additionally, we propose a novel and effective framework. This framework combines forward inference, backward inference, reflection, and refinement, enabling the LLM to self-evaluate and adjust its diagnostic results. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed method, we design and conduct extensive experiments. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We also provide a comprehensive experimental analysis and suggest future research directions for this task.
Fantastic Bugs and Where to Find Them in AI Benchmarks
Benchmarks are pivotal in driving AI progress, and invalid benchmark questions frequently undermine their reliability. Manually identifying and correcting errors among thousands of benchmark questions is not only infeasible but also a critical bottleneck for reliable evaluation. In this work, we introduce a framework for systematic benchmark revision that leverages statistical analysis of response patterns to flag potentially invalid questions for further expert review. Our approach builds on a core assumption commonly used in AI evaluations that the mean score sufficiently summarizes model performance. This implies a unidimensional latent construct underlying the measurement experiment, yielding expected ranges for various statistics for each item. When empirically estimated values for these statistics fall outside the expected range for an item, the item is more likely to be problematic. Across nine widely used benchmarks, our method guides expert review to identify problematic questions with up to 84\% precision. In addition, we introduce an LLM-judge first pass to review questions, further reducing human effort. Together, these components provide an efficient and scalable framework for systematic benchmark revision.
CORRECT: COndensed eRror RECognition via knowledge Transfer in multi-agent systems
Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly capable of tackling complex real-world tasks, yet their reliance on inter-agent coordination, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning makes error recognition particularly challenging. Minor errors can propagate across agents, escalating into task failures while producing long, intertwined execution trajectories that impose significant costs for both human developers and automated systems to debug and analyze. Our key insight is that, despite surface differences in failure trajectories (e.g., logs), MAS errors often recur with similar structural patterns. This paper presents CORRECT, the first lightweight, training-free framework that leverages an online cache of distilled error schemata to recognize and transfer knowledge of failure structures across new requests. This cache-based reuse allows LLMs to perform targeted error localization at inference time, avoiding the need for expensive retraining while adapting to dynamic MAS deployments in subseconds. To support rigorous study in this domain, we also introduce CORRECT-Error, a large-scale dataset of over 2,000 annotated trajectories collected through a novel error-injection pipeline guided by real-world distributions, and further validated through human evaluation to ensure alignment with natural failure patterns. Experiments across seven diverse MAS applications show that CORRECT improves step-level error localization up to 19.8% over existing advances while at near-zero overhead, substantially narrowing the gap between automated and human-level error recognition.
Mass-Producing Failures of Multimodal Systems with Language Models
Deployed multimodal systems can fail in ways that evaluators did not anticipate. In order to find these failures before deployment, we introduce MultiMon, a system that automatically identifies systematic failures -- generalizable, natural-language descriptions of patterns of model failures. To uncover systematic failures, MultiMon scrapes a corpus for examples of erroneous agreement: inputs that produce the same output, but should not. It then prompts a language model (e.g., GPT-4) to find systematic patterns of failure and describe them in natural language. We use MultiMon to find 14 systematic failures (e.g., "ignores quantifiers") of the CLIP text-encoder, each comprising hundreds of distinct inputs (e.g., "a shelf with a few/many books"). Because CLIP is the backbone for most state-of-the-art multimodal systems, these inputs produce failures in Midjourney 5.1, DALL-E, VideoFusion, and others. MultiMon can also steer towards failures relevant to specific use cases, such as self-driving cars. We see MultiMon as a step towards evaluation that autonomously explores the long tail of potential system failures. Code for MULTIMON is available at https://github.com/tsb0601/MultiMon.
ErrorMap and ErrorAtlas: Charting the Failure Landscape of Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLM) benchmarks tell us when models fail, but not why they fail. A wrong answer on a reasoning dataset may stem from formatting issues, calculation errors, or dataset noise rather than weak reasoning. Without disentangling such causes, benchmarks remain incomplete and cannot reliably guide model improvement. We introduce ErrorMap, the first method to chart the sources of LLM failure. It extracts a model's unique "failure signature", clarifies what benchmarks measure, and broadens error identification to reduce blind spots. This helps developers debug models, aligns benchmark goals with outcomes, and supports informed model selection. ErrorMap works on any model or dataset with the same logic. Applying our method to 35 datasets and 83 models we generate ErrorAtlas, a taxonomy of model errors, revealing recurring failure patterns. ErrorAtlas highlights error types that are currently underexplored in LLM research, such as omissions of required details in the output and question misinterpretation. By shifting focus from where models succeed to why they fail, ErrorMap and ErrorAtlas enable advanced evaluation - one that exposes hidden weaknesses and directs progress. Unlike success, typically measured by task-level metrics, our approach introduces a deeper evaluation layer that can be applied globally across models and tasks, offering richer insights into model behavior and limitations. We make the taxonomy and code publicly available with plans to periodically update ErrorAtlas as new benchmarks and models emerge.
LEMMA: Learning from Errors for MatheMatical Advancement in LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capability in solving mathematical problems. However, existing approaches primarily focus on improving the quality of correct training data, e.g., distilling high-quality correct solutions from advanced models, neglecting the value contained in error data, potentially hindering the model's reflective ability. Though some studies attempt to leverage error data, they often involve complex mechanisms, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore error nodes. In this work, we propose to enhance LLMs' reasoning ability by Learning from Errors for Mathematical Advancement (LEMMA). LEMMA constructs data consisting of an incorrect solution with an erroneous step and a reflection connection to a correct solution for fine-tuning. Specifically, we systematically analyze the model-generated error types and introduce an error-type grounded mistake augmentation method to collect diverse and representative errors. Correct solutions are either from fixing the errors or generating a fresh start. Through a model-aware smooth reflection connection, the erroneous solution is transferred to the correct one. By fine-tuning on the constructed dataset, the model is able to self-correct errors autonomously within the generation process without relying on external critique models. Experimental results demonstrate that LEMMA achieves significant performance improvements over other strong baselines.
ErrEval: Error-Aware Evaluation for Question Generation through Explicit Diagnostics
Automatic Question Generation (QG) often produces outputs with critical defects, such as factual hallucinations and answer mismatches. However, existing evaluation methods, including LLM-based evaluators, mainly adopt a black-box and holistic paradigm without explicit error modeling, leading to the neglect of such defects and overestimation of question quality. To address this issue, we propose ErrEval, a flexible and Error-aware Evaluation framework that enhances QG evaluation through explicit error diagnostics. Specifically, ErrEval reformulates evaluation as a two-stage process of error diagnosis followed by informed scoring. At the first stage, a lightweight plug-and-play Error Identifier detects and categorizes common errors across structural, linguistic, and content-related aspects. These diagnostic signals are then incorporated as explicit evidence to guide LLM evaluators toward more fine-grained and grounded judgments. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ErrEval, showing that incorporating explicit diagnostics improves alignment with human judgments. Further analyses confirm that ErrEval effectively mitigates the overestimation of low-quality questions.
Exploring LLM Agents for Cleaning Tabular Machine Learning Datasets
High-quality, error-free datasets are a key ingredient in building reliable, accurate, and unbiased machine learning (ML) models. However, real world datasets often suffer from errors due to sensor malfunctions, data entry mistakes, or improper data integration across multiple sources that can severely degrade model performance. Detecting and correcting these issues typically require tailor-made solutions and demand extensive domain expertise. Consequently, automation is challenging, rendering the process labor-intensive and tedious. In this study, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can help alleviate the burden of manual data cleaning. We set up an experiment in which an LLM, paired with Python, is tasked with cleaning the training dataset to improve the performance of a learning algorithm without having the ability to modify the training pipeline or perform any feature engineering. We run this experiment on multiple Kaggle datasets that have been intentionally corrupted with errors. Our results show that LLMs can identify and correct erroneous entries, such as illogical values or outlier, by leveraging contextual information from other features within the same row, as well as feedback from previous iterations. However, they struggle to detect more complex errors that require understanding data distribution across multiple rows, such as trends and biases.
MMErroR: A Benchmark for Erroneous Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have improved performance in multi-modal learning, raising the question of whether these models truly understand the content they process. Crucially, can VLMs detect when a reasoning process is wrong and identify its error type? To answer this, we present MMErroR, a multi-modal benchmark of 2,013 samples, each embedding a single coherent reasoning error. These samples span 24 subdomains across six top-level domains, ensuring broad coverage and taxonomic richness. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on answer correctness, MMErroR targets a process-level, error-centric evaluation that requires models to detect incorrect reasoning and classify the error type within both visual and linguistic contexts. We evaluate 20 advanced VLMs, even the best model (Gemini-3.0-Pro) classifies the error in only 66.47\% of cases, underscoring the challenge of identifying erroneous reasoning. Furthermore, the ability to accurately identify errors offers valuable insights into the capabilities of multi-modal reasoning models. Project Page: https://mmerror-benchmark.github.io
Multi-Task Program Error Repair and Explanatory Diagnosis
Program errors can occur in any type of programming, and can manifest in a variety of ways, such as unexpected output, crashes, or performance issues. And program error diagnosis can often be too abstract or technical for developers to understand, especially for beginners. The goal of this paper is to present a novel machine-learning approach for Multi-task Program Error Repair and Explanatory Diagnosis (mPRED). A pre-trained language model is used to encode the source code, and a downstream model is specifically designed to identify and repair errors. Programs and test cases will be augmented and optimized from several perspectives. Additionally, our approach incorporates a "chain of thoughts" method, which enables the models to produce intermediate reasoning explanations before providing the final correction. To aid in visualizing and analyzing the program structure, we use a graph neural network for program structure visualization. Overall, our approach offers a promising approach for repairing program errors across different programming languages and providing helpful explanations to programmers.
Are We Done with MMLU?
Maybe not. We identify and analyse errors in the popular Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Even though MMLU is widely adopted, our analysis demonstrates numerous ground truth errors that obscure the true capabilities of LLMs. For example, we find that 57% of the analysed questions in the Virology subset contain errors. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive framework for identifying dataset errors using a novel error taxonomy. Then, we create MMLU-Redux, which is a subset of 3,000 manually re-annotated questions across 30 MMLU subjects. Using MMLU-Redux, we demonstrate significant discrepancies with the model performance metrics that were originally reported. Our results strongly advocate for revising MMLU's error-ridden questions to enhance its future utility and reliability as a benchmark. Therefore, we open up MMLU-Redux for additional annotation https://huggingface.co/datasets/edinburgh-dawg/mmlu-redux.
Exploring Multimodal Large Language Models for Radiology Report Error-checking
This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from two real-world radiology datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray), with 1,000 subsampled reports each. A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing various type of mistakes. The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. LLaVA (Large Language and Visual Assistant) variant models, including our instruction-tuned model, were used for the evaluation. Additionally, a domain expert evaluation was conducted on a small test set. At the SIMPLE level, the LLaVA v1.5 model outperformed other publicly available models. Instruction tuning significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray data, respectively. The model also surpassed the domain experts accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multi-modal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans. Nevertheless, future work is needed to improve the model ability to identify the types of inconsistency.
Azimuth: Systematic Error Analysis for Text Classification
We present Azimuth, an open-source and easy-to-use tool to perform error analysis for text classification. Compared to other stages of the ML development cycle, such as model training and hyper-parameter tuning, the process and tooling for the error analysis stage are less mature. However, this stage is critical for the development of reliable and trustworthy AI systems. To make error analysis more systematic, we propose an approach comprising dataset analysis and model quality assessment, which Azimuth facilitates. We aim to help AI practitioners discover and address areas where the model does not generalize by leveraging and integrating a range of ML techniques, such as saliency maps, similarity, uncertainty, and behavioral analyses, all in one tool. Our code and documentation are available at github.com/servicenow/azimuth.
Mathematical Proof as a Litmus Test: Revealing Failure Modes of Advanced Large Reasoning Models
Large reasoning models (e.g., R1, o3) have demonstrated remarkable mathematical problem-solving abilities. However, the high reported accuracy of these advanced models on popular datasets, reliance on purely numerical evaluation and potential benchmark leakage, often masks their true reasoning shortcomings. To address this, we propose leveraging the inherent rigor and methodological complexity of mathematical proofs as a diagnostic tool to expose these hidden failures. Specifically, we introduce the RFMDataset (Reveal Failure Modes), a collection of 200 diverse mathematical proof problems, and thoroughly evaluate advanced models' performance on it. Our in-depth analysis of their failures uncovers 10 fine-grained error types, which shows fundamental limitations in current large reasoning models: 1) large reasoning models grapple profoundly with mathematical proofs, with some generating entirely correct proofs for less than 20% of problems and failing even on basic ones; 2) models exhibit a diverse spectrum of reasoning failures, prominently demonstrating the lack of guarantees for the correctness and rigor of single-step reasoning; and 3) models show hallucination and incompleteness during the reasoning process. Our findings reveal that models' self-reflection is insufficient to resolve the current logical dilemmas, necessitating formalized and fine-grained logical training.
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.
How Many Code and Test Cases Are Enough? Evaluating Test Cases Generation from a Binary-Matrix Perspective
Evaluating test cases automatically generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging task. Existing benchmarks often evaluate the exclusion ratio on large, unstructured collections of wrong codes, suffering from high computational costs and score inflation. Furthermore, they inadvertently reward generators that detect common, trivial bugs, while failing to penalize their inability to identify rare yet critical faults. In this work, we connect two fundamental questions: (1) What is the minimal set of wrong codes sufficient to represent the entire error space? and (2) What is the minimal set of test cases needed to distinguish them? We introduce a novel framework that formalizes benchmark construction as finding an optimal diagnostic basis in a binary code-test matrix, where rows represent wrong codes and columns represent test case results. The rank of this matrix specifies the minimal number of independent error patterns (wrong codes) and provides a tight upper bound on the number of test cases required for complete fault coverage. Our objective is to identify a basis of size equal to the matrix rank that maximizes internal diversity. To tackle this NP-hard problem, we propose WrongSelect, an efficient approximation algorithm to select maximally diverse wrong codes. Applying this framework to millions of competitive programming submissions, we construct TC-Bench, a compact, diverse, and inflation-resistant benchmark. Extensive experiments show that even the most advanced test case generation methods achieve only ~60% exclusion rates on TC-Bench, exposing a significant gap in their diagnostic power and highlighting substantial room for future improvement. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Luoberta/TC-Bench and our code is at: https://github.com/Luowaterbi/TC-Bench.
DiagnosisArena: Benchmarking Diagnostic Reasoning for Large Language Models
The emergence of groundbreaking large language models capable of performing complex reasoning tasks holds significant promise for addressing various scientific challenges, including those arising in complex clinical scenarios. To enable their safe and effective deployment in real-world healthcare settings, it is urgently necessary to benchmark the diagnostic capabilities of current models systematically. Given the limitations of existing medical benchmarks in evaluating advanced diagnostic reasoning, we present DiagnosisArena, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark designed to rigorously assess professional-level diagnostic competence. DiagnosisArena consists of 1,113 pairs of segmented patient cases and corresponding diagnoses, spanning 28 medical specialties, deriving from clinical case reports published in 10 top-tier medical journals. The benchmark is developed through a meticulous construction pipeline, involving multiple rounds of screening and review by both AI systems and human experts, with thorough checks conducted to prevent data leakage. Our study reveals that even the most advanced reasoning models, o3-mini, o1, and DeepSeek-R1, achieve only 45.82%, 31.09%, and 17.79% accuracy, respectively. This finding highlights a significant generalization bottleneck in current large language models when faced with clinical diagnostic reasoning challenges. Through DiagnosisArena, we aim to drive further advancements in AIs diagnostic reasoning capabilities, enabling more effective solutions for real-world clinical diagnostic challenges. We provide the benchmark and evaluation tools for further research and development https://github.com/SPIRAL-MED/DiagnosisArena.
Root-Cause Attribution Is a Search Problem: Continual Search for Long-Horizon Agent Failures
The increasing deployment of AI agents in long-horizon tasks yields massive execution logs. Diagnosing failures within these records is crucial for reliability, as it transforms outcome-level signals into actionable interventions. The sheer scale of the data renders human review impractical, driving the need for automated root-cause attribution (RCA). However, automated RCA methods using LLMs suffer from low diagnostic accuracy, especially as execution traces grow larger. They struggle because relevant information is often sparse, distributed across distant actions, and disconnected from the visible failure, reducing root-cause attribution to a massive search problem. Existing RCA methods typically rely on one-shot LLM judgments to diagnose failures from execution traces. While effective for shorter trajectories, these judges tend to settle on a plausible diagnosis early, leaving critical evidence in longer traces unexamined. We introduce Continual Search, an iterative framework that nudges the judge, over successive turns, to keep searching for unresolved diagnostic evidence. We evaluate Continual Search across four existing RCA benchmarks. Recognizing the lack of massive execution traces in current benchmarks, we introduce MegaRCA-Mix to evaluate RCA at scale. MegaRCA-Mix provides a challenging testbed of 50 human-annotated failure trials spanning long-horizon, execution-heavy tasks. Across multiple benchmark suites and model families, Continual Search consistently improves attribution performance. On MegaRCA-Mix, for example, it improves GPT-5.5's F1 score by more than 40\%, from 0.349 to 0.498. More interestingly, within the same model family, lower-tier models can even surpass their higher-tier counterparts, demonstrating that effective search supersedes raw model scale.
AEGIS: Automated Error Generation and Identification for Multi-Agent Systems
As Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) become increasingly autonomous and complex, understanding their error modes is critical for ensuring their reliability and safety. However, research in this area has been severely hampered by the lack of large-scale, diverse datasets with precise, ground-truth error labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce AEGIS, a novel framework for Automated Error Generation and Identification for Multi-Agent Systems. By systematically injecting controllable and traceable errors into initially successful trajectories, we create a rich dataset of realistic failures. This is achieved using a context-aware, LLM-based adaptive manipulator that performs sophisticated attacks like prompt injection and response corruption to induce specific, predefined error modes. We demonstrate the value of our dataset by exploring three distinct learning paradigms for the error identification task: Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning, and Contrastive Learning. Our comprehensive experiments show that models trained on AEGIS data achieve substantial improvements across all three learning paradigms. Notably, several of our fine-tuned models demonstrate performance competitive with or superior to proprietary systems an order of magnitude larger, validating our automated data generation framework as a crucial resource for developing more robust and interpretable multi-agent systems. Our project website is available at https://kfq20.github.io/AEGIS-Website.
iSEA: An Interactive Pipeline for Semantic Error Analysis of NLP Models
Error analysis in NLP models is essential to successful model development and deployment. One common approach for diagnosing errors is to identify subpopulations in the dataset where the model produces the most errors. However, existing approaches typically define subpopulations based on pre-defined features, which requires users to form hypotheses of errors in advance. To complement these approaches, we propose iSEA, an Interactive Pipeline for Semantic Error Analysis in NLP Models, which automatically discovers semantically-grounded subpopulations with high error rates in the context of a human-in-the-loop interactive system. iSEA enables model developers to learn more about their model errors through discovered subpopulations, validate the sources of errors through interactive analysis on the discovered subpopulations, and test hypotheses about model errors by defining custom subpopulations. The tool supports semantic descriptions of error-prone subpopulations at the token and concept level, as well as pre-defined higher-level features. Through use cases and expert interviews, we demonstrate how iSEA can assist error understanding and analysis.
MedPRMBench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Process Reward Models in Medical Reasoning
Process-Level Reward Models (PRMs) are essential for guiding complex reasoning in large language models, yet existing PRM benchmarks cover only general domains such as mathematics, failing to address medical reasoning -- which is uniquely characterized by safety criticality, knowledge intensity, and diverse error patterns. Without a reliable medical PRM evaluation framework, we cannot quantify models' error detection capabilities in clinical reasoning, leaving their safety in real-world healthcare applications unverified. We propose MedPRMBench, the first process-level reward model benchmark for the medical domain. Built through a three-phase pipeline based on Clinical Reasoning Blueprints (CRBs), MedPRMBench systematically generates high-quality evaluation data from seven medical QA sources, covering 14 fine-grained error types across three categories (Simplicity, Soundness, and Sensitivity) with the first 4-level severity grading system to quantify clinical impact. The benchmark comprises 6{,}500 questions with 13{,}000 reasoning chains and 113{,}910 step-level labels, plus 6{,}879 questions for training. Our medical PRM baseline achieves an 87.1\% overall PRMScore -- substantially surpassing all baselines -- and serves as a plug-and-play verifier that improves downstream medical QA accuracy by 3.2--6.7 percentage points. Systematic evaluation spanning proprietary frontier models, open-source reasoning models, and medical-specialized models reveals critical weaknesses in current models' medical reasoning error detection capabilities, providing clear directions for future PRM improvement.
Stalled, Biased, and Confused: Uncovering Reasoning Failures in LLMs for Cloud-Based Root Cause Analysis
Root cause analysis (RCA) is essential for diagnosing failures within complex software systems to ensure system reliability. The highly distributed and interdependent nature of modern cloud-based systems often complicates RCA efforts, particularly for multi-hop fault propagation, where symptoms appear far from their true causes. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to enhance automated RCA. However, their practical value for RCA depends on the fidelity of reasoning and decision-making. Existing work relies on historical incident corpora, operates directly on high-volume telemetry beyond current LLM capacity, or embeds reasoning inside complex multi-agent pipelines -- conditions that obscure whether failures arise from reasoning itself or from peripheral design choices. We present a focused empirical evaluation that isolates an LLM's reasoning behavior. We design a controlled experimental framework that foregrounds the LLM by using a simplified experimental setting. We evaluate six LLMs under two agentic workflows (ReAct and Plan-and-Execute) and a non-agentic baseline on two real-world case studies (GAIA and OpenRCA). In total, we executed 48,000 simulated failure scenarios, totaling 228 days of execution time. We measure both root-cause accuracy and the quality of intermediate reasoning traces. We produce a labeled taxonomy of 16 common RCA reasoning failures and use an LLM-as-a-Judge for annotation. Our results clarify where current open-source LLMs succeed and fail in multi-hop RCA, quantify sensitivity to input data modalities, and identify reasoning failures that predict final correctness. Together, these contributions provide transparent and reproducible empirical results and a failure taxonomy to guide future work on reasoning-driven system diagnosis.
Ensembling LLM-Induced Decision Trees for Explainable and Robust Error Detection
Error detection (ED), which aims to identify incorrect or inconsistent cell values in tabular data, is important for ensuring data quality. Recent state-of-the-art ED methods leverage the pre-trained knowledge and semantic capability embedded in large language models (LLMs) to directly label whether a cell is erroneous. However, this LLM-as-a-labeler pipeline (1) relies on the black box, implicit decision process, thus failing to provide explainability for the detection results, and (2) is highly sensitive to prompts, yielding inconsistent outputs due to inherent model stochasticity, therefore lacking robustness. To address these limitations, we propose an LLM-as-an-inducer framework that adopts LLM to induce the decision tree for ED (termed TreeED) and further ensembles multiple such trees for consensus detection (termed ForestED), thereby improving explainability and robustness. Specifically, based on prompts derived from data context, decision tree specifications and output requirements, TreeED queries the LLM to induce the decision tree skeleton, whose root-to-leaf decision paths specify the stepwise procedure for evaluating a given sample. Each tree contains three types of nodes: (1) rule nodes that perform simple validation checks (e.g., format or range), (2) Graph Neural Network (GNN) nodes that capture complex patterns (e.g., functional dependencies), and (3) leaf nodes that output the final decision types (error or clean). Furthermore, ForestED employs uncertainty-based sampling to obtain multiple row subsets, constructing a decision tree for each subset using TreeED. It then leverages an Expectation-Maximization-based algorithm that jointly estimates tree reliability and optimizes the consensus ED prediction. Extensive xperiments demonstrate that our methods are accurate, explainable and robust, achieving an average F1-score improvement of 16.1% over the best baseline.
Fix your Models by Fixing your Datasets
The quality of underlying training data is very crucial for building performant machine learning models with wider generalizabilty. However, current machine learning (ML) tools lack streamlined processes for improving the data quality. So, getting data quality insights and iteratively pruning the errors to obtain a dataset which is most representative of downstream use cases is still an ad-hoc manual process. Our work addresses this data tooling gap, required to build improved ML workflows purely through data-centric techniques. More specifically, we introduce a systematic framework for (1) finding noisy or mislabelled samples in the dataset and, (2) identifying the most informative samples, which when included in training would provide maximal model performance lift. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework on public as well as private enterprise datasets of two Fortune 500 companies, and are confident this work will form the basis for ML teams to perform more intelligent data discovery and pruning.
Automated Multi-Source Debugging and Natural Language Error Explanation for Dashboard Applications
Modern web dashboards and enterprise applications increasingly rely on complex, distributed microservices architectures. While these architectures offer scalability, they introduce significant challenges in debugging and observability. When failures occur, they often manifest as opaque error messages to the end-user such as Something went wrong. This masks the underlying root cause which may reside in browser side exceptions, API contract violations, or server side logic failures. Existing monitoring tools capture these events in isolation but fail to correlate them effectively or provide intelligible explanations to non technical users. This paper proposes a novel system for Automated Multi Source Debugging and Natural Language Error Explanation. The proposed framework automatically collects and correlates error data from disparate sources such as browser, API, server logs and validates API contracts in real time, and utilizes Large Language Models to generate natural language explanations. This approach significantly reduces Mean Time to Resolution for support engineers and improves the user experience by transforming cryptic error codes into actionable insights.
When Agents Fail to Act: A Diagnostic Framework for Tool Invocation Reliability in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Multi-agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are transforming enterprise automation, yet systematic evaluation methodologies for assessing tool-use reliability remain underdeveloped. We introduce a comprehensive diagnostic framework that leverages big data analytics to evaluate procedural reliability in intelligent agent systems, addressing critical needs for SME-centric deployment in privacy-sensitive environments. Our approach features a 12-category error taxonomy capturing failure modes across tool initialization, parameter handling, execution, and result interpretation. Through systematic evaluation of 1,980 deterministic test instances spanning both open-weight models (Qwen2.5 series, Functionary) and proprietary alternatives (GPT-4, Claude 3.5/3.7) across diverse edge hardware configurations, we identify actionable reliability thresholds for production deployment. Our analysis reveals that procedural reliability, particularly tool initialization failures, constitutes the primary bottleneck for smaller models, while qwen2.5:32b achieves flawless performance matching GPT-4.1. The framework demonstrates that mid-sized models (qwen2.5:14b) offer practical accuracy-efficiency trade-offs on commodity hardware (96.6\% success rate, 7.3 s latency), enabling cost-effective intelligent agent deployment for resource-constrained organizations. This work establishes foundational infrastructure for systematic reliability evaluation of tool-augmented multi-agent AI systems.
A Meta-analytical Comparison of Naive Bayes and Random Forest for Software Defect Prediction
Is there a statistical difference between Naive Bayes and Random Forest in terms of recall, f-measure, and precision for predicting software defects? By utilizing systematic literature review and meta-analysis, we are answering this question. We conducted a systematic literature review by establishing criteria to search and choose papers, resulting in five studies. After that, using the meta-data and forest-plots of five chosen papers, we conducted a meta-analysis to compare the two models. The results have shown that there is no significant statistical evidence that Naive Bayes perform differently from Random Forest in terms of recall, f-measure, and precision.
Discovering Knowledge Deficiencies of Language Models on Massive Knowledge Base
Large language models (LLMs) possess impressive linguistic capabilities but often fail to faithfully retain factual knowledge, leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Understanding LLMs' knowledge deficiencies by exhaustively evaluating against full-scale knowledge bases is computationally prohibitive, especially for closed-weight models. We propose stochastic error ascent (SEA), a scalable and efficient framework for discovering knowledge deficiencies (errors) in closed-weight LLMs under a strict query budget. Rather than naively probing all knowledge candidates, SEA formulates error discovery as a stochastic optimization process: it iteratively retrieves new high-error candidates by leveraging the semantic similarity to previously observed failures. To further enhance search efficiency and coverage, SEA employs hierarchical retrieval across document and paragraph levels, and constructs a relation directed acyclic graph to model error propagation and identify systematic failure modes. Empirically, SEA uncovers 40.7x more knowledge errors than Automated Capability Discovery and 26.7% more than AutoBencher, while reducing the cost-per-error by 599x and 9x, respectively. Human evaluation confirms the high quality of generated questions, while ablation and convergence analyses validate the contribution of each component in SEA. Further analysis on the discovered errors reveals correlated failure patterns across LLM families and recurring deficits, highlighting the need for better data coverage and targeted fine-tuning in future LLM development.
SEAL : Interactive Tool for Systematic Error Analysis and Labeling
With the advent of Transformers, large language models (LLMs) have saturated well-known NLP benchmarks and leaderboards with high aggregate performance. However, many times these models systematically fail on tail data or rare groups not obvious in aggregate evaluation. Identifying such problematic data groups is even more challenging when there are no explicit labels (e.g., ethnicity, gender, etc.) and further compounded for NLP datasets due to the lack of visual features to characterize failure modes (e.g., Asian males, animals indoors, waterbirds on land, etc.). This paper introduces an interactive Systematic Error Analysis and Labeling (\seal) tool that uses a two-step approach to first identify high error slices of data and then, in the second step, introduce methods to give human-understandable semantics to those underperforming slices. We explore a variety of methods for coming up with coherent semantics for the error groups using language models for semantic labeling and a text-to-image model for generating visual features. SEAL toolkit and demo screencast is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/nazneen/seal.
Classifying Syntactic Errors in Learner Language
We present a method for classifying syntactic errors in learner language, namely errors whose correction alters the morphosyntactic structure of a sentence. The methodology builds on the established Universal Dependencies syntactic representation scheme, and provides complementary information to other error-classification systems. Unlike existing error classification methods, our method is applicable across languages, which we showcase by producing a detailed picture of syntactic errors in learner English and learner Russian. We further demonstrate the utility of the methodology for analyzing the outputs of leading Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems.
MedObvious: Exposing the Medical Moravec's Paradox in VLMs via Clinical Triage
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used for tasks like medical report generation and visual question answering. However, fluent diagnostic text does not guarantee safe visual understanding. In clinical practice, interpretation begins with pre-diagnostic sanity checks: verifying that the input is valid to read (correct modality and anatomy, plausible viewpoint and orientation, and no obvious integrity violations). Existing benchmarks largely assume this step is solved, and therefore miss a critical failure mode: a model can produce plausible narratives even when the input is inconsistent or invalid. We introduce MedObvious, a 1,880-task benchmark that isolates input validation as a set-level consistency capability over small multi-panel image sets: the model must identify whether any panel violates expected coherence. MedObvious spans five progressive tiers, from basic orientation/modality mismatches to clinically motivated anatomy/viewpoint verification and triage-style cues, and includes five evaluation formats to test robustness across interfaces. Evaluating 17 different VLMs, we find that sanity checking remains unreliable: several models hallucinate anomalies on normal (negative-control) inputs, performance degrades when scaling to larger image sets, and measured accuracy varies substantially between multiple-choice and open-ended settings. These results show that pre-diagnostic verification remains unsolved for medical VLMs and should be treated as a distinct, safety-critical capability before deployment.
TRAIL: Trace Reasoning and Agentic Issue Localization
The increasing adoption of agentic workflows across diverse domains brings a critical need to scalably and systematically evaluate the complex traces these systems generate. Current evaluation methods depend on manual, domain-specific human analysis of lengthy workflow traces - an approach that does not scale with the growing complexity and volume of agentic outputs. Error analysis in these settings is further complicated by the interplay of external tool outputs and language model reasoning, making it more challenging than traditional software debugging. In this work, we (1) articulate the need for robust and dynamic evaluation methods for agentic workflow traces, (2) introduce a formal taxonomy of error types encountered in agentic systems, and (3) present a set of 148 large human-annotated traces (TRAIL) constructed using this taxonomy and grounded in established agentic benchmarks. To ensure ecological validity, we curate traces from both single and multi-agent systems, focusing on real-world applications such as software engineering and open-world information retrieval. Our evaluations reveal that modern long context LLMs perform poorly at trace debugging, with the best Gemini-2.5-pro model scoring a mere 11% on TRAIL. Our dataset and code are made publicly available to support and accelerate future research in scalable evaluation for agentic workflows.
MedExAgent: Training LLM Agents to Ask, Examine, and Diagnose in Noisy Clinical Environments
Real-world clinical diagnosis is a complex process in which the doctor is required to obtain information from both interaction with the patient and conducting medical exams. Additionally, the doctor needs to adapt to different patient personas, as well as noisy and incomplete information that can happen at any time during the process. However, existing benchmarks for medical LLMs and methods for automatic diagnosis largely simplify this process by reducing it to single-turn question answering, noise-free conversations, or sequential exam making, etc., ignoring the interactive and uncertain nature of clinical diagnosis. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by formalizing clinical diagnosis as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) with three action types: questioning the patient, ordering medical exams as tool calls, and issuing a diagnosis. We also introduce a systematic noise model comprising seven patient noise types and three exam noise types. Using our proposed environment, we train an effective diagnosis agent, MedExAgent, through a two-stage pipeline that first performs supervised finetuning on synthetic conversations structured after the Calgary-Cambridge model for clinical interviews, and then applies DAPO to optimize a composite reward capturing diagnostic accuracy, tool call quality, and exam cost including financial cost and patient discomfort. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate that MedExAgent achieves diagnostic performance comparable to larger models while maintaining cost-efficient examination strategies.
Decoding the Critique Mechanism in Large Reasoning Models
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit backtracking and self-verification mechanisms that enable them to revise intermediate steps and reach correct solutions, yielding strong performance on complex logical benchmarks. We hypothesize that such behaviors are beneficial only when the model has sufficiently strong ``critique'' ability to detect its own mistakes. This work systematically investigates how current LRMs recover from errors by inserting arithmetic mistakes in their intermediate reasoning steps. Notably, we discover a peculiar yet important phenomenon: despite the error propagating throughout the entire chain-of-thought (CoT) without any verbalized correction, the model still reaches the correct final answer after the thinking process finishes. This recovery implies the existence of an internal mechanism helping the model to detect errors and trigger self-correction, which we refer to as the hidden critique ability. Building on feature space analysis, we identify a highly interpretable critique vector representing this behavior. Extensive experiments across multiple model scales and families demonstrate that steering latent representations with this vector improves the model's error detection capability and enhances the performance of test-time scaling at no extra training cost. Our findings provide a valuable understanding of LRMs' critique behavior, suggesting a promising direction to control and improve their self-verification mechanism. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mail-research/lrm-critique-vectors.
Automatic Failure Attribution and Critical Step Prediction Method for Multi-Agent Systems Based on Causal Inference
Multi-agent systems (MAS) are critical for automating complex tasks, yet their practical deployment is severely hampered by the challenge of failure attribution. Current diagnostic tools, which rely on statistical correlations, are fundamentally inadequate; on challenging benchmarks like Who\&When, state-of-the-art methods achieve less than 15\% accuracy in locating the root-cause step of a failure. To address this critical gap, we introduce the first failure attribution framework for MAS grounded in multi-granularity causal inference. Our approach makes two key technical contributions: (1) a performance causal inversion principle, which correctly models performance dependencies by reversing the data flow in execution logs, combined with Shapley values to accurately assign agent-level blame; (2) a novel causal discovery algorithm, CDC-MAS, that robustly identifies critical failure steps by tackling the non-stationary nature of MAS interaction data. The framework's attribution results directly fuel an automated optimization loop, generating targeted suggestions whose efficacy is validated via counterfactual simulations. Evaluations on the Who\&When and TRAIL benchmarks demonstrate a significant leap in performance. Our method achieves up to 36.2\% step-level accuracy. Crucially, the generated optimizations boost overall task success rates by an average of 22.4\%. This work provides a principled and effective solution for debugging complex agent interactions, paving the way for more reliable and interpretable multi-agent systems.
From Blind Spots to Gains: Diagnostic-Driven Iterative Training for Large Multimodal Models
As Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) scale up and reinforcement learning (RL) methods mature, LMMs have made notable progress in complex reasoning and decision making. Yet training still relies on static data and fixed recipes, making it difficult to diagnose capability blind spots or provide dynamic, targeted reinforcement. Motivated by findings that test driven error exposure and feedback based correction outperform repetitive practice, we propose Diagnostic-driven Progressive Evolution (DPE), a spiral loop where diagnosis steers data generation and reinforcement, and each iteration re-diagnoses the updated model to drive the next round of targeted improvement. DPE has two key components. First, multiple agents annotate and quality control massive unlabeled multimodal data, using tools such as web search and image editing to produce diverse, realistic samples. Second, DPE attributes failures to specific weaknesses, dynamically adjusts the data mixture, and guides agents to generate weakness focused data for targeted reinforcement. Experiments on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct show stable, continual gains across eleven benchmarks, indicating DPE as a scalable paradigm for continual LMM training under open task distributions. Our code, models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/hongruijia/DPE.
NeuroProlog: Multi-Task Fine-Tuning for Neurosymbolic Mathematical Reasoning via the Cocktail Effect
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on natural language tasks but remain unreliable in mathematical reasoning, frequently generating fluent yet logically inconsistent solutions. We present NeuroProlog, a neurosymbolic framework that ensures verifiable reasoning by compiling math word problems into executable Prolog programs with formal verification guarantees. We propose a multi-task Cocktail training strategy that jointly optimizes three synergistic objectives in a unified symbolic representation space: (i) mathematical formula-to-rule translation (KB), (ii) natural language-to-program synthesis (SOLVE), and (iii) program-answer alignment. This joint supervision enables positive transfer, where symbolic grounding in formula translation directly improves compositional reasoning capabilities. At inference, we introduce an execution-guided decoding pipeline with fine-grained error taxonomy that enables iterative program repair and quantifies model self-debugging capacity. Comprehensive evaluation on GSM8K across four model scales (3B--32B parameters) demonstrates consistent improvements: cocktail training achieves significant accuracy gains of +5.23\% (Qwen-32B, p < 0.01), +3.43\% (GPT-OSS-20B, p < 0.01), and +5.54\% (Llama-3B, p < 0.05) over single-task baselines. Systematic error analysis reveals scale-dependent learning dynamics: at 32B scale, cocktail training transforms unfixable type errors (12\% repair rate) into correctable domain errors (96\% repair rate), achieving 92.7\% overall correction; at 8B scale, the same training eliminates syntactic errors but introduces semantic failures, revealing a critical capacity threshold for type-safe symbolic reasoning.
AgentSLR: Automating Systematic Literature Reviews in Epidemiology with Agentic AI
Systematic literature reviews are essential for synthesizing scientific evidence but are costly, difficult to scale and time-intensive, creating bottlenecks for evidence-based policy. We study whether large language models can automate the complete systematic review workflow, from article retrieval, article screening, data extraction to report synthesis. Applied to epidemiological reviews of nine WHO-designated priority pathogens and validated against expert-curated ground truth, our open-source agentic pipeline (AgentSLR) achieves performance comparable to human researchers while reducing review time from approximately 7 weeks to 20 hours (a 58x speed-up). Our comparison of five frontier models reveals that performance on SLR is driven less by model size or inference cost than by each model's distinctive capabilities. Through human-in-the-loop validation, we identify key failure modes. Our results demonstrate that agentic AI can substantially accelerate scientific evidence synthesis in specialised domains.
SymDiag: Explainable Diagnosis for LLM Reasoning via Neuro-Symbolic Verification
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as data-driven reasoners, yet their chains-of-thought (CoT) can be unfaithful even when final answers are correct. Most existing ``verification'' signals are not diagnostic: answer matching observes only the outcome, LLM-as-judge provides subjective and non-verifiable critiques, and scalar rewards (e.g., PRMs/RMs) offer little insight into where a multi-step derivation fails.We propose SymDiag, a neuro-symbolic framework that reframes reasoning verification as structured failure diagnosis. SymDiag translates natural-language CoT into symbolic constraints and performs step-level satisfiability/entailment checks to (i) localize failing steps and (ii) produce verifiable diagnostic evidence, including counterexamples, inconsistency witnesses, and missing-premise indicators. A central challenge is that apparent ``logic violations'' can be caused either by genuine reasoning defects or by neural-to-symbolic translation noise. SymDiag therefore incorporates a Self-Auditor that disentangles TranslationError from ReasoningError via dual symbolic encodings consistency checks, enabling robust diagnosis under partial observability. Across diverse mathematical, logical, scientific, and general reasoning benchmarks, SymDiag improves detection of unfaithful reasoning and provides substantially more effective feedback for multi-round reasoning repair than outcome-only verification and LLM-based judging, offering a principled foundation for trustworthy and scalable reasoning diagnosis.
Error Span Annotation: A Balanced Approach for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation
High-quality Machine Translation (MT) evaluation relies heavily on human judgments. Comprehensive error classification methods, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are expensive as they are time-consuming and can only be done by experts, whose availability may be limited especially for low-resource languages. On the other hand, just assigning overall scores, like Direct Assessment (DA), is simpler and faster and can be done by translators of any level, but is less reliable. In this paper, we introduce Error Span Annotation (ESA), a human evaluation protocol which combines the continuous rating of DA with the high-level error severity span marking of MQM. We validate ESA by comparing it to MQM and DA for 12 MT systems and one human reference translation (English to German) from WMT23. The results show that ESA offers faster and cheaper annotations than MQM at the same quality level, without the requirement of expensive MQM experts.
ParaRecover: A Process-Level Benchmark for Error Localization and Recovery in Parallel Tool-Use Agents
Existing agent benchmarks mainly evaluate final task success or tool-call correctness, providing limited insight into whether agents can reliably diagnose and recover from intermediate execution failures. This limitation becomes particularly critical in multi-turn parallel tool-use scenarios, where errors may propagate across dependent branches and trigger cascading failures. We introduce ParaRecover, a process-level benchmark for evaluating error localization and recovery in multi-turn parallel tool-use agents. Built upon a fine-grained taxonomy of 14 error types covering planning dependencies, tool selection, and argument matching, the benchmark comprises 10,626 instances spanning two difficulty levels. To enable finegrained, process-oriented evaluation, we further propose the SDE rubric, which measures structural integrity, diagnostic reasoning, and evolutionary strategy during agent execution.Experiments across more than ten mainstream LLMs reveal that even state-of-the-art models still struggle with multi-turn error propagation,implicit tool-use failures, and precise replanning. Moreover, we demonstrate that the SDE rubric provides effective supervision signals for improving agents' reflective recovery capabilities. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/gbw206/ParaRecover.
CausalT5K: Diagnosing and Informing Refusal for Trustworthy Causal Reasoning of Skepticism, Sycophancy, Detection-Correction, and Rung Collapse
LLM failures in causal reasoning, including sycophancy, rung collapse, and miscalibrated refusal, are well-documented, yet progress on remediation is slow because no benchmark enables systematic diagnosis. We introduce CausalT5K, a diagnostic benchmark of over 5,000 cases across 10 domains that tests three critical capabilities: (1) detecting rung collapse, where models answer interventional queries with associational evidence; (2) resisting sycophantic drift under adversarial pressure; and (3) generating Wise Refusals that specify missing information when evidence is underdetermined. Unlike synthetic benchmarks, CausalT5K embeds causal traps in realistic narratives and decomposes performance into Utility (sensitivity) and Safety (specificity), revealing failure modes invisible to aggregate accuracy. Developed through a rigorous human-machine collaborative pipeline involving 40 domain experts, iterative cross-validation cycles, and composite verification via rule-based, LLM, and human scoring, CausalT5K implements Pearl's Ladder of Causation as research infrastructure. Preliminary experiments reveal a Four-Quadrant Control Landscape where static audit policies universally fail, a finding that demonstrates CausalT5K's value for advancing trustworthy reasoning systems. Repository: https://github.com/genglongling/CausalT5kBench
QED: An Open-Source Multi-Agent System for Generating Mathematical Proofs on Open Problems
We explore a central question in AI for mathematics: can AI systems produce original, nontrivial proofs for open research problems? Despite strong benchmark performance, producing genuinely novel proofs remains an outstanding challenge for LLMs. Through systematic experiments with frontier LLMs on research-level proof tasks, we identify seven failure modes that prevent reliable proof generation, including context contamination, citation hallucination, hand-waving on key steps and misallocation of proof effort, unstable proof plans, unfocused verification, problem modification and single-model bottleneck. We argue that the gap between benchmark success and research-level proving is primarily one of system design, due to those failure modes. We present QED, an open-source multi-agent proof system in which each architectural decision directly addresses a specific failure mode. Evaluated on five open problems in applied analysis and PDEs contributed by domain experts, QED produces correct proofs for three problems, each verified by the contributing experts as original and nontrivial. QED is released as open-source software at https://github.com/proofQED/QED.
When Failures Propagate: Causal Failure Attribution in Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) interleaves retrieval, reasoning, and answer generation across multiple hops. A retrieval error at hop 1 can surface only as a wrong answer at hop 3, while later retrieval can also repair the trajectory. This paper introduces AgenticRAG-FP, an interventional benchmark for causal failure attribution in agentic RAG. The benchmark injects a certified fault at a specified hop, re-executes the downstream trajectory, and evaluates diagnosers against the known intervention. Its central question is whether a post-hoc trace still identifies the injected hop after the suffix changes. In the completed strict dense Claude Haiku 4.5 sweep on 80 three-hop MuSiQue questions, coverage-based diagnosis is 0.91 at hop 1 and 0.00 at hops 2 and 3 (n=43,36,21 failed trajectories). A smaller content-corruption study changes an answer-bearing or bridge fact in topically intact evidence. At depth 2, where 18 failed cases remain after filtering, coverage-based diagnosis is 0.00 and a frozen-hop counterfactual probe is 0.67 in an exploratory pooled comparison. Depth-3 content estimates are descriptive only because they contain three failed cases. These results make propagation depth an explicit evaluation axis for diagnosing agentic RAG failures while distinguishing broad evidence of post-hoc signal loss from small-sample method comparisons.
VerifyMAS: Hypothesis Verification for Failure Attribution in LLM Multi-Agent Systems
Large language model-driven multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) excel at complex tasks, yet unreliable agents remain a key bottleneck to system-level reliability. Automatic failure attribution is therefore critical, but existing approaches, such as direct prediction of agent-error pairs and agent-first failure attribution, rely on local logs of agents and miss global failures that only manifest over full interaction trajectories, such as cross-step inconsistencies and inter-agent coordination errors. Moreover, directly predicting failures induces a large combinatorial search space, hindering fine-grained attribution. To address these challenges, we propose VerifyMAS, a hypothesis verification framework for agent failure attribution. Instead of directly predicting faulty agents and error types, VerifyMAS formulates and verifies failure hypotheses against full trajectories. This verification-based approach decomposes attribution into trajectory-level error validation and fine-grained agent localization, providing an error-first attribution approach that captures global failure patterns while substantially reducing the search space. We further introduce a hypothesis-based data construction strategy grounded in a structured error taxonomy and fine-tune a specialized LLM verifier model for trajectory-level failure verification and agent attribution. Experiments on Aegis-Bench and Who&When show that VerifyMAS consistently improves diverse backbone models, including open-source Qwen and API-based GPT models, outperforming prior methods without sacrificing inference efficiency for long multi-agent trajectories.
Diagnosing Failure Root Causes in Platform-Orchestrated Agentic Systems: Dataset, Taxonomy, and Benchmark
Agentic systems consisting of multiple LLM-driven agents coordinating through tools and structured interactions, are increasingly deployed for complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks. At the same time, emerging low-code and template-based agent development platforms (e.g., Dify) enable users to rapidly build and orchestrate agentic systems, which we refer to as platform-orchestrated agentic systems. However, these systems are also fragile and it remains unclear how to systematically identify their potential failure root cause. This paper presents a study of root cause identification of these platform-orchestrated agentic systems. To support this initiative, we construct a dataset AgentFail containing 307 failure logs from ten agentic systems, each with fine-grained annotations linking failures to their root causes. We additionally utilize counterfactual reasoning-based repair strategy to ensure the reliability of the annotation. Building on the dataset, we develop a taxonomy that characterizes failure root causes and analyze their distribution across different platforms and task domains. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmark that leverages LLMs for automatically identifying root causes, in which we also utilize the proposed taxonomy as guidance for LLMs. Results show that the taxonomy can largely improve the performance, thereby confirming its utility. Nevertheless, the accuracy of root cause identification reaches at most 33.6%, which indicates that this task still remains challenging. In light of these results, we also provide actionable guidelines for building such agentic systems. In summary, this paper provides a reliable dataset of failure root cause for platform-orchestrated agentic systems, corresponding taxonomy and benchmark, which serves as a foundation for advancing the development of more reliable agentic systems.
MEDEC: A Benchmark for Medical Error Detection and Correction in Clinical Notes
Several studies showed that Large Language Models (LLMs) can answer medical questions correctly, even outperforming the average human score in some medical exams. However, to our knowledge, no study has been conducted to assess the ability of language models to validate existing or generated medical text for correctness and consistency. In this paper, we introduce MEDEC (https://github.com/abachaa/MEDEC), the first publicly available benchmark for medical error detection and correction in clinical notes, covering five types of errors (Diagnosis, Management, Treatment, Pharmacotherapy, and Causal Organism). MEDEC consists of 3,848 clinical texts, including 488 clinical notes from three US hospital systems that were not previously seen by any LLM. The dataset has been used for the MEDIQA-CORR shared task to evaluate seventeen participating systems [Ben Abacha et al., 2024]. In this paper, we describe the data creation methods and we evaluate recent LLMs (e.g., o1-preview, GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash) for the tasks of detecting and correcting medical errors requiring both medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities. We also conducted a comparative study where two medical doctors performed the same task on the MEDEC test set. The results showed that MEDEC is a sufficiently challenging benchmark to assess the ability of models to validate existing or generated notes and to correct medical errors. We also found that although recent LLMs have a good performance in error detection and correction, they are still outperformed by medical doctors in these tasks. We discuss the potential factors behind this gap, the insights from our experiments, the limitations of current evaluation metrics, and share potential pointers for future research.
Hop, Skip, and Overthink: Diagnosing Why Reasoning Models Fumble during Multi-Hop Analysis
The emergence of reasoning models and their integration into practical AI chat bots has led to breakthroughs in solving advanced math, deep search, and extractive question answering problems that requires a complex and multi-step thought process. Yet, a complete understanding of why these models hallucinate more than general purpose language models is missing. In this investigative study, we systematicallyexplore reasoning failures of contemporary language models on multi-hop question answering tasks. We introduce a novel, nuanced error categorization framework that examines failures across three critical dimensions: the diversity and uniqueness of source documents involved ("hops"), completeness in capturing relevant information ("coverage"), and cognitive inefficiency ("overthinking"). Through rigorous hu-man annotation, supported by complementary automated metrics, our exploration uncovers intricate error patterns often hidden by accuracy-centric evaluations. This investigative approach provides deeper insights into the cognitive limitations of current models and offers actionable guidance toward enhancing reasoning fidelity, transparency, and robustness in future language modeling efforts.
Evaluating AI systems under uncertain ground truth: a case study in dermatology
For safety, medical AI systems undergo thorough evaluations before deployment, validating their predictions against a ground truth which is assumed to be fixed and certain. However, this ground truth is often curated in the form of differential diagnoses. While a single differential diagnosis reflects the uncertainty in one expert assessment, multiple experts introduce another layer of uncertainty through disagreement. Both forms of uncertainty are ignored in standard evaluation which aggregates these differential diagnoses to a single label. In this paper, we show that ignoring uncertainty leads to overly optimistic estimates of model performance, therefore underestimating risk associated with particular diagnostic decisions. To this end, we propose a statistical aggregation approach, where we infer a distribution on probabilities of underlying medical condition candidates themselves, based on observed annotations. This formulation naturally accounts for the potential disagreements between different experts, as well as uncertainty stemming from individual differential diagnoses, capturing the entire ground truth uncertainty. Our approach boils down to generating multiple samples of medical condition probabilities, then evaluating and averaging performance metrics based on these sampled probabilities. In skin condition classification, we find that a large portion of the dataset exhibits significant ground truth uncertainty and standard evaluation severely over-estimates performance without providing uncertainty estimates. In contrast, our framework provides uncertainty estimates on common metrics of interest such as top-k accuracy and average overlap, showing that performance can change multiple percentage points. We conclude that, while assuming a crisp ground truth can be acceptable for many AI applications, a more nuanced evaluation protocol should be utilized in medical diagnosis.
CareTransition-Audit: A Benchmark to Audit Discharge Summaries for Efficient Care Transitions
Incomplete or inconsistent discharge documentation drives care fragmentation and avoidable readmissions. Despite its critical role in patient safety, auditing discharge summaries relies on manual review and does not scale. We propose an automated framework for auditing discharge summaries using large language models (LLMs). Our approach operationalizes the DISCHARGED framework into a checklist of 46 questions. Using 50 summaries from the MIMIC-IV database, with clinician ground-truth labels, we benchmark 11 LLMs. Model-assessed mean documentation completeness ranges from 54.9% to 74.2%, and the best-performing models achieve a Cohen's kappa values around 0.5 against clinician labels, indicating moderate agreement. All models struggle to identify ambiguous documentation (Unclear), highlighting a key gap in current automated auditing. This work provides a clinician-validated benchmark and zero-shot baselines for systematic quality improvement in clinical documentation.
SCRIBE: Diagnostic Evaluation and Rich Transcription Models for Indic ASR
Automatic speech recognition replaces typing only when correction costs less than manual entry, a threshold determined by error types, not counts: fixing a misrecognized domain term costs far more than inserting a comma. Word error rate (WER) fails on two fronts: it collapses distinct error categories into a single scalar, and it structurally penalizes agglutinative languages where valid sandhi merges inflate scores. We introduce SCRIBE, a diagnostic framework that provides categorical error decomposition into lexical, punctuation, numeral, and domain-entity rates through sandhi-tolerant alignment with domain vocabulary injection. Human validation confirms SCRIBE aligns with expert judgment where WER does not. We release SCRIBE, an LLM curation pipeline, benchmarks, and open-weight rich transcription models for Hindi, Malayalam, and Kannada.
Can We Enhance Bug Report Quality Using LLMs?: An Empirical Study of LLM-Based Bug Report Generation
Bug reports contain the information developers need to triage and fix software bugs. However, unclear, incomplete, or ambiguous information may lead to delays and excessive manual effort spent on bug triage and resolution. In this paper, we explore whether Instruction fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can automatically transform casual, unstructured bug reports into high-quality, structured bug reports adhering to a standard template. We evaluate three open-source instruction-tuned LLMs (Qwen 2.5, Mistral, and Llama 3.2) against ChatGPT-4o, measuring performance on established metrics such as CTQRS, ROUGE, METEOR, and SBERT. Our experiments show that fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 achieves a CTQRS score of 77%, outperforming both fine-tuned Mistral (71%), Llama 3.2 (63%) and ChatGPT in 3-shot learning (75%). Further analysis reveals that Llama 3.2 shows higher accuracy of detecting missing fields particularly Expected Behavior and Actual Behavior, while Qwen 2.5 demonstrates superior performance in capturing Steps-to-Reproduce, with an F1 score of 76%. Additional testing of the models on other popular projects (e.g., Eclipse, GCC) demonstrates that our approach generalizes well, achieving up to 70% CTQRS in unseen projects' bug reports. These findings highlight the potential of instruction fine-tuning in automating structured bug report generation, reducing manual effort for developers and streamlining the software maintenance process.
Garbage In, Reasoning Out? Why Benchmark Scores are Unreliable and What to Do About It
We conduct a systematic audit of three widely used reasoning benchmarks, SocialIQa, FauxPas-EAI, and ToMi, and uncover pervasive flaws in both benchmark items and evaluation methodology. Using five LLMs (GPT-{3, 3.5, 4, o1}, and LLaMA 3.1) as diagnostic tools, we identify structural, semantic, and pragmatic issues in benchmark design (e.g., duplicated items, ambiguous wording, and implausible answers), as well as scoring procedures that prioritize output form over reasoning process. Through systematic human annotation and re-evaluation on cleaned benchmark subsets, we find that model scores often improve not due to due to erratic surface wording variations and not to improved reasoning. Infact, further analyses show that model performance is highly sensitive to minor input variations such as context availability and phrasing, revealing that high scores may reflect alignment with format-specific cues rather than consistent inference based on the input. These findings challenge the validity of current benchmark-based claims about reasoning in LLMs, and highlight the need for evaluation protocols that assess reasoning as a process of drawing inference from available information, rather than as static output selection. We release audited data and evaluation tools to support more interpretable and diagnostic assessments of model reasoning.
MuSciClaims: Multimodal Scientific Claim Verification
Assessing scientific claims requires identifying, extracting, and reasoning with multimodal data expressed in information-rich figures in scientific literature. Despite the large body of work in scientific QA, figure captioning, and other multimodal reasoning tasks over chart-based data, there are no readily usable multimodal benchmarks that directly test claim verification abilities. To remedy this gap, we introduce a new benchmark MuSciClaims accompanied by diagnostics tasks. We automatically extract supported claims from scientific articles, which we manually perturb to produce contradicted claims. The perturbations are designed to test for a specific set of claim verification capabilities. We also introduce a suite of diagnostic tasks that help understand model failures. Our results show most vision-language models are poor (~0.3-0.5 F1), with even the best model only achieving 0.72 F1. They are also biased towards judging claims as supported, likely misunderstanding nuanced perturbations within the claims. Our diagnostics show models are bad at localizing correct evidence within figures, struggle with aggregating information across modalities, and often fail to understand basic components of the figure.
Diagnosis Before Recovery: Turning Agent Failures into Selective Self-Correction
Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair. Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure. This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format errors. Our insight is that development-set failures can recover part of the missing diagnostic substrate by deciding which recovery interventions are admissible before test-time correction. We propose DARC, a diagnosis-guided recovery harness that profiles task-family failure modes, prunes mismatched interventions from a shared recovery library, and freezes a verifier-selected success-cost policy for deployment. This causal order makes correction selective: the harness first determines what kind of failure can be repaired, then decides how much recovery evidence to spend. In ALFWorld, AppWorld, and XBRL Finance, the same protocol yields an action-validity harness, a procedural-recovery fallback, and a format-precision retrieval policy; in each evaluated setting it improves average task performance over base agents and broad playbooks while reducing environment steps or retrieval budget. Our experiments show that failures need not trigger uniformly more context: DARC turns self-correction from prompt expansion into recovery-interface design. DARC provides a practical route toward more reliable agents in domains where compiler-like feedback is absent: making failures actionable before making contexts larger.
HoloDetect: Few-Shot Learning for Error Detection
We introduce a few-shot learning framework for error detection. We show that data augmentation (a form of weak supervision) is key to training high-quality, ML-based error detection models that require minimal human involvement. Our framework consists of two parts: (1) an expressive model to learn rich representations that capture the inherent syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of errors; and (2) a data augmentation model that, given a small seed of clean records, uses dataset-specific transformations to automatically generate additional training data. Our key insight is to learn data augmentation policies from the noisy input dataset in a weakly supervised manner. We show that our framework detects errors with an average precision of ~94% and an average recall of ~93% across a diverse array of datasets that exhibit different types and amounts of errors. We compare our approach to a comprehensive collection of error detection methods, ranging from traditional rule-based methods to ensemble-based and active learning approaches. We show that data augmentation yields an average improvement of 20 F1 points while it requires access to 3x fewer labeled examples compared to other ML approaches.
Hallucinations Live in Variance
Benchmarks measure whether a model is correct. They do not measure whether a model is reliable. This distinction is largely academic for single-shot inference, but becomes critical for agentic AI systems, where a single rephrased prompt can trigger cascading failures in multi-step execution. Yet this form of instability is not captured by existing evaluations. Hallucinations live in variance: they arise when semantically equivalent prompts activate inconsistent internal pathways, producing divergent outputs. Consistent but incorrect outputs reflect bias or missing knowledge; confident guessing reflects calibration failure. Neither constitutes hallucination under this definition. When error is variance-dominated, reducing redundant pathways improves reliability without adding knowledge. We formalize this through Semantic Stability (SS), measured via Paraphrase Consistency (PC@k): generate k paraphrases, greedy decode each, compute mode agreement. SS is a diagnostic for variance-driven unreliability, not a method for improving correctness. We show that a dense Qwen3-0.6B agrees with itself only 23.8% of the time; at 32% sparsity, agreement jumps to 55.9%. A phase diagram reveals the sweet spot where variance reduction outpaces bias accumulation, and regimes where stability collapses onto wrong answers.
Evidence-Calibrated Runtime Reconstruction for Agent Skills Across Heterogeneous Coding Agents
Agent Skills package reusable instructions and assets for tool-using language-model agents. Progressive loading creates failure boundaries poorly represented by session-, model-, or tool-centric traces: a Skill can be discovered but not activated, activated without instructions, or appear successful without an independently verified outcome. We present Skill Runtime Intelligence, a passive runtime-intelligence system that reconstructs supported Skill-lifecycle stages across heterogeneous harnesses while preserving unsupported stages as unknown. Its Run Panorama separates immutable events, deterministic relations, inferred diagnoses, and controlled outcomes with four evidence grades; optional trace import and OTLP/HTTP export support existing observability deployments. Across six frozen repository profiles, three coding agents, and seven clean or fault-injected conditions, all 126 executions preserve source worktrees and each correlates to exactly one source session. Yet adapters expose three distinct semantics: no Skill runs; complete runs but no failure-like events; or failure-like events in every operational-failure and clean session. In a seven-template diagnostic study, semantic aliases and Panorama localize the same six non-clean boundaries but differ in exact/status behavior; both Raw views emit a failure status on all 18 clean cases, while Panorama emits none. A known-rule graph conforms to 126/126 frozen contracts, whereas a second model completes only 228/378 calls. These observations motivate executable adapter qualification and show that event presence is not boundary fidelity, composite exact scores mask distinct errors, and model explanations must not overwrite deterministic facts.
Learning to Repair Lean Proofs from Compiler Feedback
As neural theorem provers become increasingly agentic, the ability to interpret and act on compiler feedback is critical. However, existing Lean datasets consist almost exclusively of correct proofs, offering little supervision for understanding and repairing failures. We study Lean proof repair as a supervised learning problem: given an erroneous proof and compiler feedback, predict both a corrected proof and a natural-language diagnosis grounded in the same feedback. We introduce APRIL (Automated Proof Repair in Lean), a dataset of 260,000 supervised tuples pairing systematically generated proof failures with compiler diagnostics and aligned repair and explanation targets. Training language models on APRIL substantially improves repair accuracy and feedback-conditioned reasoning; in our single-shot repair evaluation setting, a finetuned 4B-parameter model outperforms the strongest open-source baseline. We view diagnostic-conditioned supervision as a complementary training signal for feedback-using provers. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/uw-math-ai/APRIL{this link}.
The Drill-Down and Fabricate Test (DDFT): A Protocol for Measuring Epistemic Robustness in Language Models
Current language model evaluations measure what models know under ideal conditions but not how robustly they know it under realistic stress. Static benchmarks like MMLU and TruthfulQA cannot distinguish a model that lacks knowledge from one whose verification mechanisms collapse when information degrades or adversaries probe for weaknesses. We introduce the Drill-Down and Fabricate Test (DDFT), a protocol that measures epistemic robustness: a model's ability to maintain factual accuracy under progressive semantic compression and adversarial fabrication. We propose a two-system cognitive model comprising a Semantic System that generates fluent text and an Epistemic Verifier that validates factual accuracy. Our findings, based on evaluating 9 frontier models across 8 knowledge domains at 5 compression levels (1,800 turn-level evaluations), reveal that epistemic robustness is orthogonal to conventional design paradigms. Neither parameter count (r=0.083, p=0.832) nor architectural type (r=0.153, p=0.695) significantly predicts robustness, suggesting it emerges from training methodology and verification mechanisms distinct from current approaches. Error detection capability strongly predicts overall robustness (rho=-0.817, p=0.007), indicating this is the critical bottleneck. We find that flagship models exhibit brittleness despite their scale, while smaller models can achieve robust performance, challenging assumptions about the relationship between model size and reliability. The DDFT framework provides both theoretical foundation and practical tools for assessing epistemic robustness before deployment in critical applications.
Discovery of interpretable structural model errors by combining Bayesian sparse regression and data assimilation: A chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky test case
Models of many engineering and natural systems are imperfect. The discrepancy between the mathematical representations of a true physical system and its imperfect model is called the model error. These model errors can lead to substantial differences between the numerical solutions of the model and the state of the system, particularly in those involving nonlinear, multi-scale phenomena. Thus, there is increasing interest in reducing model errors, particularly by leveraging the rapidly growing observational data to understand their physics and sources. Here, we introduce a framework named MEDIDA: Model Error Discovery with Interpretability and Data Assimilation. MEDIDA only requires a working numerical solver of the model and a small number of noise-free or noisy sporadic observations of the system. In MEDIDA, first the model error is estimated from differences between the observed states and model-predicted states (the latter are obtained from a number of one-time-step numerical integrations from the previous observed states). If observations are noisy, a data assimilation (DA) technique such as ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is employed to provide the analysis state of the system, which is then used to estimate the model error. Finally, an equation-discovery technique, here the relevance vector machine (RVM), a sparsity-promoting Bayesian method, is used to identify an interpretable, parsimonious, and closed-form representation of the model error. Using the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) system as the test case, we demonstrate the excellent performance of MEDIDA in discovering different types of structural/parametric model errors, representing different types of missing physics, using noise-free and noisy observations.
Assessing the Ability of ChatGPT to Screen Articles for Systematic Reviews
By organizing knowledge within a research field, Systematic Reviews (SR) provide valuable leads to steer research. Evidence suggests that SRs have become first-class artifacts in software engineering. However, the tedious manual effort associated with the screening phase of SRs renders these studies a costly and error-prone endeavor. While screening has traditionally been considered not amenable to automation, the advent of generative AI-driven chatbots, backed with large language models is set to disrupt the field. In this report, we propose an approach to leverage these novel technological developments for automating the screening of SRs. We assess the consistency, classification performance, and generalizability of ChatGPT in screening articles for SRs and compare these figures with those of traditional classifiers used in SR automation. Our results indicate that ChatGPT is a viable option to automate the SR processes, but requires careful considerations from developers when integrating ChatGPT into their SR tools.
TrajAD: Trajectory Anomaly Detection for Trustworthy LLM Agents
We address the problem of runtime trajectory anomaly detection, a critical capability for enabling trustworthy LLM agents. Current safety measures predominantly focus on static input/output filtering. However, we argue that ensuring LLM agents reliability requires auditing the intermediate execution process. In this work, we formulate the task of Trajectory Anomaly Detection. The goal is not merely detection, but precise error localization. This capability is essential for enabling efficient rollback-and-retry. To achieve this, we construct TrajBench, a dataset synthesized via a perturb-and-complete strategy to cover diverse procedural anomalies. Using this benchmark, we investigate the capability of models in process supervision. We observe that general-purpose LLMs, even with zero-shot prompting, struggle to identify and localize these anomalies. This reveals that generalized capabilities do not automatically translate to process reliability. To address this, we propose TrajAD, a specialized verifier trained with fine-grained process supervision. Our approach outperforms baselines, demonstrating that specialized supervision is essential for building trustworthy agents.
Don't Take the Premise for Granted: Evaluating the Premise Critique Ability of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed rapid advancements, demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, a notable vulnerability persists: LLMs often uncritically accept flawed or contradictory premises, leading to inefficient reasoning and unreliable outputs. This emphasizes the significance of possessing the Premise Critique Ability for LLMs, defined as the capacity to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises. Most existing studies assess LLMs' reasoning ability in ideal settings, largely ignoring their vulnerabilities when faced with flawed premises. Thus, we introduce the Premise Critique Bench (PCBench), designed by incorporating four error types across three difficulty levels, paired with multi-faceted evaluation metrics. We conducted systematic evaluations of 15 representative LLMs. Our findings reveal: (1) Most models rely heavily on explicit prompts to detect errors, with limited autonomous critique; (2) Premise critique ability depends on question difficulty and error type, with direct contradictions being easier to detect than complex or procedural errors; (3) Reasoning ability does not consistently correlate with the premise critique ability; (4) Flawed premises trigger overthinking in reasoning models, markedly lengthening responses due to repeated attempts at resolving conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LLMs' proactive evaluation of input validity, positioning premise critique as a foundational capability for developing reliable, human-centric systems. The code is available at https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/Premise_Critique.
Claim-Level Reliability Assessment for Efficient Test-Time Reasoning
We propose claim-level falsification as a principle for test-time scaling and instantiate it through Claim-Level Reliability Assessment (CLR), a training-free framework that reallocates test-time compute from additional solution sampling to targeted verification. Since whole-trace evaluation often obscures decisive errors due to signal dilution from routine tokens, CLR condenses each reasoning trace into a compact set of decision-critical claims, thereby isolating its logical anchors. Furthermore, recognizing the inherent difficulty of generating entirely correct solutions under fixed model capabilities, CLR shifts the focus to semantic falsification. This approach exploits a fundamental asymmetry between solution construction and claim refutation. Constructing a valid solution requires a flawless reasoning path, whereas refuting an incorrect claim requires identifying only a single decisive flaw. This targeted search for negative evidence systematically compresses the survival space of high-confidence incorrect traces, effectively suppressing erroneous consensus via nonlinear reliability scoring. Across four LLMs and four reasoning benchmarks under matched budgets, CLR generally improves upon pass@1 and self-consistency. On GPT-OSS-20B/CMIMC25, for instance, CLR exceeds pass@1 by 27.15 percentage-points and raises self-consistency accuracy from 77.50\% to 82.19\% with 37.0\% fewer tokens.
SigmaMedStat: Temporal Signal Modeling for ICU False Alarm Reduction
Alarm fatigue in intensive care units (ICUs) is a well documented patient safety crisis. Clinical monitors generate 350 or more alarms per patient per day, out of which 72-99% are clinically irrelevant. Staff desensitization to non-actionable alarms increases the risk of missed true emergencies. This paper presents SigmaMedStat, a machine learning system that evaluates the trustworthiness of physiological alarm signals before clinical action is taken. Four approaches were evaluated on the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2015 dataset of 498 four-channel ICU alarm recordings. Primary contribution is a temporal modeling framework that splits each 60 second recording into six consecutive 10-second chunks, and this in turn generates Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) scalograms per chunk, encodes each chunk with a shared EfficientNet-B0 encoder, and passes the resulting feature sequence to a two-layer Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. Five-fold stratified cross-validation yields a mean AUC of 0.822 +/- 0.016 (95% CI: [0.790,0.853]), compared to 0.641 for a static EfficientNet baseline trained on the full 60-second window. Ablation studies confirm that temporal chunking and multi-channel signal fusion both contribute independently to classification performance. Per-alarm type analysis reveals that Ventricular Flutter is the most accurately classified alarm type (AUC 0.820) while Asystole remains the hardest (AUC 0.722). Error analysis identifies 65 false negatives and 85 high-confidence misclassifications as the primary failure modes. All code and results are publicly available at https://github.com/Arun-K-Ram/sigmamedstat.
Phrase-grounded Fact-checking for Automatically Generated Chest X-ray Reports
With the emergence of large-scale vision language models (VLM), it is now possible to produce realistic-looking radiology reports for chest X-ray images. However, their clinical translation has been hampered by the factual errors and hallucinations in the produced descriptions during inference. In this paper, we present a novel phrase-grounded fact-checking model (FC model) that detects errors in findings and their indicated locations in automatically generated chest radiology reports. Specifically, we simulate the errors in reports through a large synthetic dataset derived by perturbing findings and their locations in ground truth reports to form real and fake findings-location pairs with images. A new multi-label cross-modal contrastive regression network is then trained on this dataset. We present results demonstrating the robustness of our method in terms of accuracy of finding veracity prediction and localization on multiple X-ray datasets. We also show its effectiveness for error detection in reports of SOTA report generators on multiple datasets achieving a concordance correlation coefficient of 0.997 with ground truth-based verification, thus pointing to its utility during clinical inference in radiology workflows.
MedRECT: A Medical Reasoning Benchmark for Error Correction in Clinical Texts
Large language models (LLMs) show increasing promise in medical applications, but their ability to detect and correct errors in clinical texts -- a prerequisite for safe deployment -- remains under-evaluated, particularly beyond English. We introduce MedRECT, a cross-lingual benchmark (Japanese/English) that formulates medical error handling as three subtasks: error detection, error localization (sentence extraction), and error correction. MedRECT is built with a scalable, automated pipeline from the Japanese Medical Licensing Examinations (JMLE) and a curated English counterpart, yielding MedRECT-ja (663 texts) and MedRECT-en (458 texts) with comparable error/no-error balance. We evaluate 9 contemporary LLMs spanning proprietary, open-weight, and reasoning families. Key findings: (i) reasoning models substantially outperform standard architectures, with up to 13.5% relative improvement in error detection and 51.0% in sentence extraction; (ii) cross-lingual evaluation reveals 5-10% performance gaps from English to Japanese, with smaller disparities for reasoning models; (iii) targeted LoRA fine-tuning yields asymmetric improvements in error correction performance (Japanese: +0.078, English: +0.168) while preserving reasoning capabilities; and (iv) our fine-tuned model exceeds human expert performance on structured medical error correction tasks. To our knowledge, MedRECT is the first comprehensive cross-lingual benchmark for medical error correction, providing a reproducible framework and resources for developing safer medical LLMs across languages.
MedEinst: Benchmarking the Einstellung Effect in Medical LLMs through Counterfactual Differential Diagnosis
Despite achieving high accuracy on medical benchmarks, LLMs exhibit the Einstellung Effect in clinical diagnosis--relying on statistical shortcuts rather than patient-specific evidence, causing misdiagnosis in atypical cases. Existing benchmarks fail to detect this critical failure mode. We introduce MedEinst, a counterfactual benchmark with 5,383 paired clinical cases across 49 diseases. Each pair contains a control case and a "trap" case with altered discriminative evidence that flips the diagnosis. We measure susceptibility via Bias Trap Rate--probability of misdiagnosing traps despite correctly diagnosing controls. Extensive Evaluation of 17 LLMs shows frontier models achieve high baseline accuracy but severe bias trap rates. Thus, we propose ECR-Agent, aligning LLM reasoning with Evidence-Based Medicine standard via two components: (1) Dynamic Causal Inference (DCI) performs structured reasoning through dual-pathway perception, dynamic causal graph reasoning across three levels (association, intervention, counterfactual), and evidence audit for final diagnosis; (2) Critic-Driven Graph and Memory Evolution (CGME) iteratively refines the system by storing validated reasoning paths in an exemplar base and consolidating disease-specific knowledge into evolving illness graphs. Source code is to be released.
Catch Me If You Can: How Smaller Reasoning Models Pretend to Reason with Mathematical Fidelity
Current evaluation of mathematical reasoning in language models relies primarily on answer accuracy, potentially masking fundamental failures in logical computation. We introduce a diagnostic framework that distinguishes genuine mathematical reasoning from superficial pattern matching through four complementary axes: forward-backward consistency, transitivity coverage, counterfactual sensitivity, and perturbation robustness. Through a case study applying this framework to Qwen3-0.6B on the MenatQA dataset, we reveal a striking disconnect between surface performance and reasoning fidelity. While the model achieves reasonable answer accuracy (70%+), it demonstrates poor backward consistency (15%), limited transitivity coverage (32.2%), and brittle sensitivity to perturbations. Our diagnostics expose reasoning failures invisible to traditional accuracy metrics, suggesting that this small model relies heavily on pattern matching rather than genuine logical computation. While our empirical findings are based on a single 600M-parameter model, the diagnostic framework itself is model-agnostic and generalizable. We release our evaluation protocols to enable the research community to assess reasoning fidelity across different model scales and architectures, moving beyond surface-level accuracy toward verifiable mathematical reasoning.
Justified or Just Convincing? Error Verifiability as a Dimension of LLM Quality
As LLMs are deployed in high-stakes settings, users must judge the correctness of individual responses, often relying on model-generated justifications such as reasoning chains or explanations. Yet, no standard measure exists for whether these justifications help users distinguish correct answers from incorrect ones. We formalize this idea as error verifiability and propose v_{bal}, a balanced metric that measures whether justifications enable raters to accurately assess answer correctness, validated against human raters who show high agreement. We find that neither common approaches, such as post-training and model scaling, nor more targeted interventions recommended improve verifiability. We introduce two methods that succeed at improving verifiability: reflect-and-rephrase (RR) for mathematical reasoning and oracle-rephrase (OR) for factual QA, both of which improve verifiability by incorporating domain-appropriate external information. Together, our results establish error verifiability as a distinct dimension of response quality that does not emerge from accuracy improvements alone and requires dedicated, domain-aware methods to address.
LADDER: Language Driven Slice Discovery and Error Rectification
Error slice discovery is crucial to diagnose and mitigate model errors. Current clustering or discrete attribute-based slice discovery methods face key limitations: 1) clustering results in incoherent slices, while assigning discrete attributes to slices leads to incomplete coverage of error patterns due to missing or insufficient attributes; 2) these methods lack complex reasoning, preventing them from fully explaining model biases; 3) they fail to integrate domain knowledge, limiting their usage in specialized fields \eg radiology. We propose\ladder (Language-Driven Discovery and Error Rectification), to address the limitations by: (1) leveraging the flexibility of natural language to address incompleteness, (2) employing LLM's latent domain knowledge and advanced reasoning to analyze sentences and derive testable hypotheses directly, identifying biased attributes, and form coherent error slices without clustering. Existing mitigation methods typically address only the worst-performing group, often amplifying errors in other subgroups. In contrast,\ladder generates pseudo attributes from the discovered hypotheses to mitigate errors across all biases without explicit attribute annotations or prior knowledge of bias. Rigorous evaluations on 6 datasets spanning natural and medical images -- comparing 200+ classifiers with diverse architectures, pretraining strategies, and LLMs -- show that\ladder consistently outperforms existing baselines in discovering and mitigating biases.
A Specialized Large Language Model for Clinical Reasoning and Diagnosis in Rare Diseases
Rare diseases affect hundreds of millions worldwide, yet diagnosis often spans years. Convectional pipelines decouple noisy evidence extraction from downstream inferential diagnosis, and general/medical large language models (LLMs) face scarce real world electronic health records (EHRs), stale domain knowledge, and hallucinations. We assemble a large, domain specialized clinical corpus and a clinician validated reasoning set, and develop RareSeek R1 via staged instruction tuning, chain of thought learning, and graph grounded retrieval. Across multicenter EHR narratives and public benchmarks, RareSeek R1 attains state of the art accuracy, robust generalization, and stability under noisy or overlapping phenotypes. Augmented retrieval yields the largest gains when narratives pair with prioritized variants by resolving ambiguity and aligning candidates to mechanisms. Human studies show performance on par with experienced physicians and consistent gains in assistive use. Notably, transparent reasoning highlights decisive non phenotypic evidence (median 23.1%, such as imaging, interventions, functional tests) underpinning many correct diagnoses. This work advances a narrative first, knowledge integrated reasoning paradigm that shortens the diagnostic odyssey and enables auditable, clinically translatable decision support.
Reflective Prompt Tuning through Language Model Function-Calling
Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of following instructions and complex reasoning, making prompting a flexible interface for adapting models without parameter updates. Yet prompt design remains labor-intensive and highly sensitive to formatting, phrasing, and instruction order, motivating automated prompt optimization methods that reduce manual effort while preserving inference-time flexibility. However, existing methods often search over prompt candidates or use fixed critique-refine pipelines driven by individual examples or small batches, limiting their ability to capture systematic error patterns and make targeted edits grounded in failure history. We propose Reflective Prompt Tuning (RPT), a framework that uses LLM function calling to simulate the iterative workflow of human prompt engineers. An LLM optimizer calls a diagnostic function that evaluates the target model over an entire optimization set, summarizes recurring failure modes, and returns a structured diagnostic report. The optimizer uses this report, together with an accumulated memory of prior reports, to revise the prompt for the next iteration. RPT further supports confidence-aware optimization by using calibration signals in diagnostic feedback and final prompt selection. Across three reasoning tasks, RPT improves over initial prompts by up to 12.9 points, remains competitive with state of the art, and improves confidence calibration. Our analyses show that RPT is especially effective on multi-hop and mathematical reasoning, producing targeted prompt revisions that align with diagnosed failure patterns and lead to gains in task performance and calibration.
RIFT: A RubrIc Failure Mode Taxonomy and Automated Diagnostics
Rubric-based evaluation is widely used in LLM benchmarks and training pipelines for open-ended, less verifiable tasks. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of rubrics using downstream signals such as reinforcement learning outcomes, there remains no principled way to diagnose how a rubric itself fails from such aggregated or downstream signals alone. To address this gap, we introduce RIFT: RubrIc Failure mode Taxonomy, a taxonomy for systematically characterizing failure modes in rubric composition and design. RIFT consists of eight failure modes organized into three high-level categories: Reliability Failures, Content Validity Failures, and Consequential Validity Failures. RIFT is developed using grounded theory by iteratively annotating rubrics drawn from five diverse data sources spanning general instruction following, code generation, creative writing, and expert-level deep research, until no new failure modes are identified. We evaluate the consistency of the taxonomy by measuring agreement among independent human annotators, observing fair agreement overall (87% pairwise agreement and 0.64 average Cohen's kappa). Finally, to support scalable diagnosis, we propose automated rubric quality metrics and show that they align with human failure-mode annotations, achieving up to 0.925 F1.
Fine-grained evaluation of Quality Estimation for Machine translation based on a linguistically-motivated Test Suite
We present an alternative method of evaluating Quality Estimation systems, which is based on a linguistically-motivated Test Suite. We create a test-set consisting of 14 linguistic error categories and we gather for each of them a set of samples with both correct and erroneous translations. Then, we measure the performance of 5 Quality Estimation systems by checking their ability to distinguish between the correct and the erroneous translations. The detailed results are much more informative about the ability of each system. The fact that different Quality Estimation systems perform differently at various phenomena confirms the usefulness of the Test Suite.
DeCon: Detecting Incorrect Assertions via Postconditions Generated by a Large Language Model
Recently, given the docstring for the target problem and the target function signature, large language models (LLMs) have been used not only to generate source code, but also to generate test cases, consisting of test inputs and assertions (e.g., in the form of checking an actual output against the expected output). However, as shown by our empirical study on assertions generated by four LLMs for the HumanEval benchmark, over 62% of the generated assertions are incorrect (i.e., failed on the ground-truth problem solution). To detect incorrect assertions (given the docstring and the target function signature along with a sample of example inputs and outputs), in this paper, we propose a new approach named DeCon to effectively detect incorrect assertions via LLM-generated postconditions for the target problem (a postcondition is a predicate that must always be true just after the execution of the ground-truth problem solution). Our approach requires a small set of I/O examples (i.e., a sample of example inputs and outputs) for the target problem (e.g., the I/O examples included in the docstring for a target problem in HumanEval). We use the given I/O examples to filter out those LLM-generated postconditions that are violated by at least one given I/O example. We then use the remaining postconditions to detect incorrect assertions as those assertions that violate at least one remaining postcondition. Experimental results show that DeCon can detect averagely more than 64% (63% and 65.5% detected by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, respectively) incorrect assertions generated by four state-of-the-art LLMs, and DeCon can also improve the effectiveness of these LLMs in code generation by 4% in terms of Pass@1. In addition, although DeCon might filter out correct assertions, the fault-finding ability of the remaining correct assertions decreases only slightly.
One note in three: a verified census of three deployed AI scribes, and the instrument that counted it
Ambient AI scribes draft clinical notes under the reassurance that a clinician signs every note. We audited three commercial AI scribes on the same 142 consultations: 565 notes from recorded UK primary-care and US ambulatory encounters plus authored scenarios. Twelve discovery passes proposed 13,678 candidate errors; the 5,898 clearing an importance filter went to an adversarial panel of two models from different families, each told to refute what it could, and 618 survived. One note in three (31.3% [27.0, 35.6]) carries a verified failure, concentrated in allergy and medication information, invented patient identity, and history written up as examination on telephone consultations that can contain none. No product was given a patient record; setting aside the two classes a record would have prefilled, invented identity and dates, the rate is 24.8% [20.8, 29.0]. One failure mode did not fit our scheme, drawn from published scribe-error taxonomies: a treatment the clinician retracts, recorded as delivered care. Two clinicians adjudicated blind, disjoint samples: a physician author upheld 20 of 21 findings (95.2% [77.3, 99.2]) and an independent clinician, not an author, 12 of 12 ([75.8, 100]); both judged every sampled refusal genuine. A failure rate depends on the instrument as much as the scribes. With model, evidence and settings fixed, the review instruction alone moves the share of candidates verified from 9.3% to 79.0%, and the reviewing family moves it too: alone at that instruction the gentler flags 54.8% of notes against 27.8%. Between 28% and 97% of sampled notes carry a failure depending on the standard. Published audits disagree among themselves by a margin instrument differences alone can produce: omission is 54-86% of their errors against our 23.1%. We release all 618 findings with transcript-side evidence, every prompt and model version, and the re-runnable pipeline.
CoD, Towards an Interpretable Medical Agent using Chain of Diagnosis
The field of medical diagnosis has undergone a significant transformation with the advent of large language models (LLMs), yet the challenges of interpretability within these models remain largely unaddressed. This study introduces Chain-of-Diagnosis (CoD) to enhance the interpretability of LLM-based medical diagnostics. CoD transforms the diagnostic process into a diagnostic chain that mirrors a physician's thought process, providing a transparent reasoning pathway. Additionally, CoD outputs the disease confidence distribution to ensure transparency in decision-making. This interpretability makes model diagnostics controllable and aids in identifying critical symptoms for inquiry through the entropy reduction of confidences. With CoD, we developed DiagnosisGPT, capable of diagnosing 9604 diseases. Experimental results demonstrate that DiagnosisGPT outperforms other LLMs on diagnostic benchmarks. Moreover, DiagnosisGPT provides interpretability while ensuring controllability in diagnostic rigor.
MedCaseReasoning: Evaluating and learning diagnostic reasoning from clinical case reports
Doctors and patients alike increasingly use Large Language Models (LLMs) to diagnose clinical cases. However, unlike domains such as math or coding, where correctness can be objectively defined by the final answer, medical diagnosis requires both the outcome and the reasoning process to be accurate. Currently, widely used medical benchmarks like MedQA and MMLU assess only accuracy in the final answer, overlooking the quality and faithfulness of the clinical reasoning process. To address this limitation, we introduce MedCaseReasoning, the first open-access dataset for evaluating LLMs on their ability to align with clinician-authored diagnostic reasoning. The dataset includes 14,489 diagnostic question-and-answer cases, each paired with detailed reasoning statements derived from open-access medical case reports. We evaluate state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs on MedCaseReasoning and find significant shortcomings in their diagnoses and reasoning: for instance, the top-performing open-source model, DeepSeek-R1, achieves only 48% 10-shot diagnostic accuracy and mentions only 64% of the clinician reasoning statements (recall). However, we demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on the reasoning traces derived from MedCaseReasoning significantly improves diagnostic accuracy and clinical reasoning recall by an average relative gain of 29% and 41%, respectively. The open-source dataset, code, and models are available at https://github.com/kevinwu23/Stanford-MedCaseReasoning.
Building Safe and Reliable AI systems for Safety Critical Tasks with Vision-Language Processing
Although AI systems have been applied in various fields and achieved impressive performance, their safety and reliability are still a big concern. This is especially important for safety-critical tasks. One shared characteristic of these critical tasks is their risk sensitivity, where small mistakes can cause big consequences and even endanger life. There are several factors that could be guidelines for the successful deployment of AI systems in sensitive tasks: (i) failure detection and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection; (ii) overfitting identification; (iii) uncertainty quantification for predictions; (iv) robustness to data perturbations. These factors are also challenges of current AI systems, which are major blocks for building safe and reliable AI. Specifically, the current AI algorithms are unable to identify common causes for failure detection. Furthermore, additional techniques are required to quantify the quality of predictions. All these contribute to inaccurate uncertainty quantification, which lowers trust in predictions. Hence obtaining accurate model uncertainty quantification and its further improvement are challenging. To address these issues, many techniques have been proposed, such as regularization methods and learning strategies. As vision and language are the most typical data type and have many open source benchmark datasets, this thesis will focus on vision-language data processing for tasks like classification, image captioning, and vision question answering. In this thesis, we aim to build a safeguard by further developing current techniques to ensure the accurate model uncertainty for safety-critical tasks.
From Signal Degradation to Computation Collapse: Uncovering the Two Failure Modes of LLM Quantization
Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is critical for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While 4-bit quantization is widely regarded as an optimal trade-off, reducing the precision to 2-bit usually triggers a catastrophic ``performance cliff.'' It remains unclear whether the underlying mechanisms differ fundamentally. Consequently, we conduct a systematic mechanistic analysis, revealing two qualitatively distinct failure modes: Signal Degradation, where the computational patterns remain intact but information precision is impaired by cumulative error; and Computation Collapse, where key components fail to function, preventing correct information processing and destroying the signal in the early layers. Guided by this diagnosis, we conduct mechanism-aware interventions, demonstrating that targeted, training-free repair can mitigate Signal Degradation, but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. Our findings provide a systematic diagnostic framework for PTQ failures and suggest that addressing Computation Collapse requires structural reconstruction rather than mere compensation.
LLM Context Conditioning and PWP Prompting for Multimodal Validation of Chemical Formulas
Identifying subtle technical errors within complex scientific and technical documents, especially those requiring multimodal interpretation (e.g., formulas in images), presents a significant hurdle for Large Language Models (LLMs) whose inherent error-correction tendencies can mask inaccuracies. This exploratory proof-of-concept (PoC) study investigates structured LLM context conditioning, informed by Persistent Workflow Prompting (PWP) principles, as a methodological strategy to modulate this LLM behavior at inference time. The approach is designed to enhance the reliability of readily available, general-purpose LLMs (specifically Gemini 2.5 Pro and ChatGPT Plus o3) for precise validation tasks, crucially relying only on their standard chat interfaces without API access or model modifications. To explore this methodology, we focused on validating chemical formulas within a single, complex test paper with known textual and image-based errors. Several prompting strategies were evaluated: while basic prompts proved unreliable, an approach adapting PWP structures to rigorously condition the LLM's analytical mindset appeared to improve textual error identification with both models. Notably, this method also guided Gemini 2.5 Pro to repeatedly identify a subtle image-based formula error previously overlooked during manual review, a task where ChatGPT Plus o3 failed in our tests. These preliminary findings highlight specific LLM operational modes that impede detail-oriented validation and suggest that PWP-informed context conditioning offers a promising and highly accessible technique for developing more robust LLM-driven analytical workflows, particularly for tasks requiring meticulous error detection in scientific and technical documents. Extensive validation beyond this limited PoC is necessary to ascertain broader applicability.
Pitfalls in Language Models for Code Intelligence: A Taxonomy and Survey
Modern language models (LMs) have been successfully employed in source code generation and understanding, leading to a significant increase in research focused on learning-based code intelligence, such as automated bug repair, and test case generation. Despite their great potential, language models for code intelligence (LM4Code) are susceptible to potential pitfalls, which hinder realistic performance and further impact their reliability and applicability in real-world deployment. Such challenges drive the need for a comprehensive understanding - not just identifying these issues but delving into their possible implications and existing solutions to build more reliable language models tailored to code intelligence. Based on a well-defined systematic research approach, we conducted an extensive literature review to uncover the pitfalls inherent in LM4Code. Finally, 67 primary studies from top-tier venues have been identified. After carefully examining these studies, we designed a taxonomy of pitfalls in LM4Code research and conducted a systematic study to summarize the issues, implications, current solutions, and challenges of different pitfalls for LM4Code systems. We developed a comprehensive classification scheme that dissects pitfalls across four crucial aspects: data collection and labeling, system design and learning, performance evaluation, and deployment and maintenance. Through this study, we aim to provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners, facilitating their understanding and utilization of LM4Code in reliable and trustworthy ways.
Silent Data Corruption by 10x Test Escapes Threatens Reliable Computing
Too many defective compute chips are escaping existing manufacturing tests -- at least an order of magnitude more than industrial targets across all compute chip types in data centers. Silent data corruptions (SDCs) caused by test escapes, when left unaddressed, pose a major threat to reliable computing. We present a three-pronged approach outlining future directions for overcoming test escapes: (a) Quick diagnosis of defective chips directly from system-level incorrect behaviors. Such diagnosis is critical for gaining insights into why so many defective chips escape existing manufacturing testing. (b) In-field detection of defective chips. (c) New test experiments to understand the effectiveness of new techniques for detecting defective chips. These experiments must overcome the drawbacks and pitfalls of previous industrial test experiments and case studies.
A PRISMA Driven Systematic Review of Publicly Available Datasets for Benchmark and Model Developments for Industrial Defect Detection
Recent advancements in quality control across various industries have increasingly utilized the integration of video cameras and image processing for effective defect detection. A critical barrier to progress is the scarcity of comprehensive datasets featuring annotated defects, which are essential for developing and refining automated defect detection models. This systematic review, spanning from 2015 to 2023, identifies 15 publicly available datasets and critically examines them to assess their effectiveness and applicability for benchmarking and model development. Our findings reveal a diverse landscape of datasets, such as NEU-CLS, NEU-DET, DAGM, KolektorSDD, PCB Defect Dataset, and the Hollow Cylindrical Defect Detection Dataset, each with unique strengths and limitations in terms of image quality, defect type representation, and real-world applicability. The goal of this systematic review is to consolidate these datasets in a single location, providing researchers who seek such publicly available resources with a comprehensive reference.
LLMs Know More Than They Show: On the Intrinsic Representation of LLM Hallucinations
Large language models (LLMs) often produce errors, including factual inaccuracies, biases, and reasoning failures, collectively referred to as "hallucinations". Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs' internal states encode information regarding the truthfulness of their outputs, and that this information can be utilized to detect errors. In this work, we show that the internal representations of LLMs encode much more information about truthfulness than previously recognized. We first discover that the truthfulness information is concentrated in specific tokens, and leveraging this property significantly enhances error detection performance. Yet, we show that such error detectors fail to generalize across datasets, implying that -- contrary to prior claims -- truthfulness encoding is not universal but rather multifaceted. Next, we show that internal representations can also be used for predicting the types of errors the model is likely to make, facilitating the development of tailored mitigation strategies. Lastly, we reveal a discrepancy between LLMs' internal encoding and external behavior: they may encode the correct answer, yet consistently generate an incorrect one. Taken together, these insights deepen our understanding of LLM errors from the model's internal perspective, which can guide future research on enhancing error analysis and mitigation.
LM vs LM: Detecting Factual Errors via Cross Examination
A prominent weakness of modern language models (LMs) is their tendency to generate factually incorrect text, which hinders their usability. A natural question is whether such factual errors can be detected automatically. Inspired by truth-seeking mechanisms in law, we propose a factuality evaluation framework for LMs that is based on cross-examination. Our key idea is that an incorrect claim is likely to result in inconsistency with other claims that the model generates. To discover such inconsistencies, we facilitate a multi-turn interaction between the LM that generated the claim and another LM (acting as an examiner) which introduces questions to discover inconsistencies. We empirically evaluate our method on factual claims made by multiple recent LMs on four benchmarks, finding that it outperforms existing methods and baselines, often by a large gap. Our results demonstrate the potential of using interacting LMs for capturing factual errors.
GR-Ben: A General Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Process Reward Models
Currently, process reward models (PRMs) have exhibited remarkable potential for test-time scaling. Since large language models (LLMs) regularly generate flawed intermediate reasoning steps when tackling a broad spectrum of reasoning and decision-making tasks, PRMs are required to possess capabilities for detecting process-level errors in real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on mathematical reasoning, thereby failing to comprehensively evaluate the error detection ability of PRMs across diverse reasoning scenarios. To mitigate this gap, we introduce GR-Ben, a process-level benchmark specifically designed for assessing PRM's performance across two primary reasoning domains (science and logic) and nine subdomains. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 22 models, encompassing both PRMs and LLMs, and derive two key findings: (1) In domains beyond mathematical reasoning, the error-detection ability of existing PRMs and LLMs is found to be markedly weaker by comparison.(2) In general, PRMs are less adept at identifying knowledge-based errors, whereas LLMs exhibit poorer performance in detecting computational errors. We hope GR-Ben can foster future researches on PRMs for general domains, thereby enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.
When Correct Isn't Usable: Improving Structured Output Reliability in Small Language Models
Deployed language models must produce outputs that are both correct and format-compliant. We study this structured-output reliability gap using two mathematical benchmarks -- GSM8K and MATH -- as a controlled testbed: ground truth is unambiguous and the output contract is strict (JSON with required fields). We evaluate three 7-9B models under five prompting strategies and report output accuracy -- the joint event of mathematical correctness and valid JSON structure -- as the primary metric. A systematic format failure emerges: NAIVE prompting (no system prompt) achieves up to 85% task accuracy on GSM8K but 0% output accuracy across all models and datasets. REFERENCE prompting (a minimal hand-written JSON format prompt) fares little better, yielding 0% output accuracy for two of four models tested. Constrained decoding enforces syntactic validity but incurs 3.6x-8.2x latency overhead and in several settings degrades task performance substantially. To overcome this limitation, we developed AloLab, an iterative system-prompt optimizer (meta-agent: Claude Sonnet 4.5) requiring only black-box API access to the target model; it reaches 84-87% output accuracy on GSM8K and 34-40% on MATH across five independent runs per model, with 29/30 paired McNemar comparisons against the best static prompt significant at p < 0.05, at near-NAIVE inference latency and without model fine-tuning. The same format failure extends to GPT-4o (OpenAI, 2024), a proprietary closed-source model: REFERENCE achieves 0% output accuracy due to systematic markdown-fence wrapping, while AloLab reaches 95.2% [94.8, 95.6]. An ablation replacing the Sonnet 4.5 meta-agent with Claude 3 Haiku reduces mean output accuracy to 61.0% and increases run-to-run standard deviation from <1 pp to 21.8 pp, confirming that meta-agent capability is a primary driver of optimization quality.
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to utilize external tools has enabled them to tackle an increasingly diverse range of tasks. However, as the tasks become more complex and long-horizon, the intricate tool utilization process may trigger various unexpected errors. Therefore, how to effectively handle such errors, including identifying, diagnosing, and recovering from them, has emerged as a key research direction for advancing tool learning. In this work, we first extensively analyze the types of errors encountered during the function-calling process on several competitive tool evaluation benchmarks. Based on it, we introduce CRITICTOOL, a comprehensive critique evaluation benchmark specialized for tool learning. Building upon a novel evolutionary strategy for dataset construction, CRITICTOOL holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on CRITICTOOL, and validate the generalization and effectiveness of our constructed benchmark strategy. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the tool reflection ability on various LLMs, offering a new perspective on the field of tool learning in LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool{https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool}.
Step-by-Step Reasoning to Solve Grid Puzzles: Where do LLMs Falter?
Solving grid puzzles involves a significant amount of logical reasoning. Hence, it is a good domain to evaluate the reasoning capability of a model which can then guide us to improve the reasoning ability of models. However, most existing works evaluate only the final predicted answer of a puzzle, without delving into an in-depth analysis of the LLMs' reasoning chains (such as where they falter) or providing any finer metrics to evaluate them. Since LLMs may rely on simple heuristics or artifacts to predict the final answer, it is crucial to evaluate the generated reasoning chain beyond overall correctness measures, for accurately evaluating the reasoning abilities of LLMs. To this end, we first develop GridPuzzle, an evaluation dataset comprising 274 grid-based puzzles with different complexities. Second, we propose a new error taxonomy derived from manual analysis of reasoning chains from LLMs including GPT-4, Claude-3, Gemini, Mistral, and Llama-2. Then, we develop an LLM-based framework for large-scale subjective evaluation (i.e., identifying errors) and an objective metric, PuzzleEval, to evaluate the correctness of reasoning chains. Evaluating reasoning chains from LLMs leads to several interesting findings. We further show that existing prompting methods used for enhancing models' reasoning abilities do not improve performance on GridPuzzle. This highlights the importance of understanding fine-grained errors and presents a challenge for future research to enhance LLMs' puzzle-solving abilities by developing methods that address these errors. Data and source code are available at https://github.com/Mihir3009/GridPuzzle.
MAS-FIRE: Fault Injection and Reliability Evaluation for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
As LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are increasingly deployed for complex tasks, ensuring their reliability has become a pressing challenge. Since MAS coordinate through unstructured natural language rather than rigid protocols, they are prone to semantic failures (e.g., hallucinations, misinterpreted instructions, and reasoning drift) that propagate silently without raising runtime exceptions. Prevailing evaluation approaches, which measure only end-to-end task success, offer limited insight into how these failures arise or how effectively agents recover from them. To bridge this gap, we propose MAS-FIRE, a systematic framework for fault injection and reliability evaluation of MAS. We define a taxonomy of 15 fault types covering intra-agent cognitive errors and inter-agent coordination failures, and inject them via three non-invasive mechanisms: prompt modification, response rewriting, and message routing manipulation. Applying MAS-FIRE to three representative MAS architectures, we uncover a rich set of fault-tolerant behaviors that we organize into four tiers: mechanism, rule, prompt, and reasoning. This tiered view enables fine-grained diagnosis of where and why systems succeed or fail. Our findings reveal that stronger foundation models do not uniformly improve robustness. We further show that architectural topology plays an equally decisive role, with iterative, closed-loop designs neutralizing over 40% of faults that cause catastrophic collapse in linear workflows. MAS-FIRE provides the process-level observability and actionable guidance needed to systematically improve multi-agent systems.
Can Large Multimodal Models Actively Recognize Faulty Inputs? A Systematic Evaluation Framework of Their Input Scrutiny Ability
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have witnessed remarkable growth, showcasing formidable capabilities in handling intricate multimodal tasks with exceptional performance. Recent research has underscored the inclination of large language models to passively accept defective inputs, often resulting in futile reasoning on invalid prompts. However, the same critical question of whether LMMs can actively detect and scrutinize erroneous inputs still remains unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the Input Scrutiny Ability Evaluation Framework (ISEval), which encompasses seven categories of flawed premises and three evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation of ten advanced LMMs has identified key findings. Most models struggle to actively detect flawed textual premises without guidance, which reflects a strong reliance on explicit prompts for premise error identification. Error type affects performance: models excel at identifying logical fallacies but struggle with surface-level linguistic errors and certain conditional flaws. Modality trust varies-Gemini 2.5 pro and Claude Sonnet 4 balance visual and textual info, while aya-vision-8b over-rely on text in conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LMMs' proactive verification of input validity and shed novel insights into mitigating the problem. The code is available at https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/LMM_ISEval.
ESTANet: Efficient Online Error Detection in Procedural Videos via Prediction Inconsistency
An efficient and accurate system for detecting errors in procedural tasks is crucial for supporting human needs in daily life, as it can provide instant notifications and guide people to correct mistakes. In this work, we study real-time online error detection in procedural videos from a simple but overlooked perspective: the prediction behavior of action detectors themselves. Instead of designing complex architectures or specialized supervision, we observe that action detectors naturally exhibit different prediction characteristics depending on their sensitivity to input dynamics and temporal context. We therefore propose ESTANet (Error-Sensitive and Temporally-vArying Network), a lightweight framework that detects errors by exploiting inconsistencies among action predictions produced by a small set of action detectors. We construct standard and error-sensitive action detectors that behave similarly on correct executions but respond differently when errors occur. Meanwhile, detectors operating with different temporal contexts further amplify prediction inconsistencies when the procedure deviates from the intended sequence. During inference, we detect errors by aggregating mismatches between standard and error-sensitive predictions through majority voting to flag frames that contain errors. Extensive experiments on EgoPER, Assembly-101-O, and EPIC-Tent-O demonstrate that ESTANet achieves state-of-the-art performance in online error detection while maintaining real-time efficiency with a lightweight architecture. Our results highlight that leveraging the intrinsic properties of action detectors can yield a powerful and practical solution for online error detection without increasing architectural design complexity.
An Empirical Study on LLM-based Agents for Automated Bug Fixing
Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based Agents have been applied to fix bugs automatically, demonstrating the capability in addressing software defects by engaging in development environment interaction, iterative validation and code modification. However, systematic analysis of these agent and non-agent systems remain limited, particularly regarding performance variations among top-performing ones. In this paper, we examine seven proprietary and open-source systems on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark for automated bug fixing. We first assess each system's overall performance, noting instances solvable by all or none of these sytems, and explore why some instances are uniquely solved by specific system types. We also compare fault localization accuracy at file and line levels and evaluate bug reproduction capabilities, identifying instances solvable only through dynamic reproduction. Through analysis, we concluded that further optimization is needed in both the LLM itself and the design of Agentic flow to improve the effectiveness of the Agent in bug fixing.
LiveMedBench: A Contamination-Free Medical Benchmark for LLMs with Automated Rubric Evaluation
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes clinical settings demands rigorous and reliable evaluation. However, existing medical benchmarks remain static, suffering from two critical limitations: (1) data contamination, where test sets inadvertently leak into training corpora, leading to inflated performance estimates; and (2) temporal misalignment, failing to capture the rapid evolution of medical knowledge. Furthermore, current evaluation metrics for open-ended clinical reasoning often rely on either shallow lexical overlap (e.g., ROUGE) or subjective LLM-as-a-Judge scoring, both inadequate for verifying clinical correctness. To bridge these gaps, we introduce LiveMedBench, a continuously updated, contamination-free, and rubric-based benchmark that weekly harvests real-world clinical cases from online medical communities, ensuring strict temporal separation from model training data. We propose a Multi-Agent Clinical Curation Framework that filters raw data noise and validates clinical integrity against evidence-based medical principles. For evaluation, we develop an Automated Rubric-based Evaluation Framework that decomposes physician responses into granular, case-specific criteria, achieving substantially stronger alignment with expert physicians than LLM-as-a-Judge. To date, LiveMedBench comprises 2,756 real-world cases spanning 38 medical specialties and multiple languages, paired with 16,702 unique evaluation criteria. Extensive evaluation of 38 LLMs reveals that even the best-performing model achieves only 39.2%, and 84% of models exhibit performance degradation on post-cutoff cases, confirming pervasive data contamination risks. Error analysis further identifies contextual application-not factual knowledge-as the dominant bottleneck, with 35-48% of failures stemming from the inability to tailor medical knowledge to patient-specific constraints.
Why Stop at One Error? Benchmarking LLMs as Data Science Code Debuggers for Multi-Hop and Multi-Bug Errors
LLMs are transforming software development, yet current code generation and code repair benchmarks mainly assess syntactic and functional correctness in simple, single-error cases. LLMs' capabilities to autonomously find and fix runtime logical errors in complex data science code remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce DSDBench: the Data Science Debugging Benchmark, the first benchmark for systematic evaluation of LLMs on multi-hop error tracing and multi-bug detection in data science code debugging. DSDBench adapts datasets from existing data science task benchmarks, such as DABench and MatPlotBench, featuring realistic data science debugging tasks with automatically synthesized multi-hop, multi-bug code snippets. DSDBench includes 1,117 annotated samples with 741 cause-effect error pairs and runtime error messages. Evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs on DSDBench show significant performance gaps, highlighting challenges in debugging logical runtime errors in data science code. DSDBench offers a crucial resource to evaluate and improve LLMs' debugging and reasoning capabilities, enabling more reliable AI-assisted data science in the future. DSDBench is publicly available at github.com/KevinCL16/DSDBench.
LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them!
While self-correction has shown promise in improving LLM outputs in terms of style and quality (e.g. Chen et al., 2023; Madaan et al., 2023), recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in worse performances overall (Huang et al., 2023). In this paper, we break down the self-correction process into two core components: mistake finding and output correction. For mistake finding, we release BIG-Bench Mistake, a dataset of logical mistakes in Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. We provide benchmark numbers for several state-of-the-art LLMs, and demonstrate that LLMs generally struggle with finding logical mistakes. For output correction, we propose a backtracking method which provides large improvements when given information on mistake location. We construe backtracking as a lightweight alternative to reinforcement learning methods, and show that it remains effective with a reward model at 60-70% accuracy.
Question answering systems for health professionals at the point of care -- a systematic review
Objective: Question answering (QA) systems have the potential to improve the quality of clinical care by providing health professionals with the latest and most relevant evidence. However, QA systems have not been widely adopted. This systematic review aims to characterize current medical QA systems, assess their suitability for healthcare, and identify areas of improvement. Materials and methods: We searched PubMed, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ACL Anthology and forward and backward citations on 7th February 2023. We included peer-reviewed journal and conference papers describing the design and evaluation of biomedical QA systems. Two reviewers screened titles, abstracts, and full-text articles. We conducted a narrative synthesis and risk of bias assessment for each study. We assessed the utility of biomedical QA systems. Results: We included 79 studies and identified themes, including question realism, answer reliability, answer utility, clinical specialism, systems, usability, and evaluation methods. Clinicians' questions used to train and evaluate QA systems were restricted to certain sources, types and complexity levels. No system communicated confidence levels in the answers or sources. Many studies suffered from high risks of bias and applicability concerns. Only 8 studies completely satisfied any criterion for clinical utility, and only 7 reported user evaluations. Most systems were built with limited input from clinicians. Discussion: While machine learning methods have led to increased accuracy, most studies imperfectly reflected real-world healthcare information needs. Key research priorities include developing more realistic healthcare QA datasets and considering the reliability of answer sources, rather than merely focusing on accuracy.
Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models for Post-Discharge Clinical Action Extraction
The work in this paper evaluates zero-shot and few-shot large language models (LLMs) for safety-critical clinical action extraction using the CLIP discharge-note dataset, with particular emphasis on transitions of care and post-discharge patient safety. To manage the complexity of clinical documentation, we introduce a two-stage extraction framework that decomposes discharge notes, that are written in narrative form, into fine-grained, explicitly actionable clinical tasks through a staged prompting strategy. Our contributions include a systematic assessment of generative LLMs for clinical action extraction, a detailed comparison between general-purpose LLMs and task-specific supervised BERT-based models, and an analysis of annotation inconsistencies across different action categories. We show that contemporary LLMs achieve performance comparable to or exceeding supervised models on binary actionability detection, while supervised baselines retain a meaningful advantage on fine-grained multi-label category classification, despite the absence of task-specific fine-tuning and under strict data-privacy constraints. Qualitative error analysis reveals that many failures stem from misalignment between model reasoning and dataset annotation conventions, particularly in cases involving implicit clinical actions and rigid structural labeling rules. These results indicate that reported performance reflects model limitations due to lack of clinical reasoning, that is not captured by plain annotations. Labels without rationales make it impossible to distinguish clinical reasoning failures from annotation convention mismatches. Advancing clinical NLP requires reasoning-annotated datasets that document why specific spans are actionable, not merely which spans were labeled, enabling proper evaluation of model clinical understanding.
SynCED-EnDe 2025: A Synthetic and Curated English - German Dataset for Critical Error Detection in Machine Translation
Critical Error Detection (CED) in machine translation aims to determine whether a translation is safe to use or contains unacceptable deviations in meaning. While the WMT21 English-German CED dataset provided the first benchmark, it is limited in scale, label balance, domain coverage, and temporal freshness. We present SynCED-EnDe, a new resource consisting of 1,000 gold-labeled and 8,000 silver-labeled sentence pairs, balanced 50/50 between error and non-error cases. SynCED-EnDe draws from diverse 2024-2025 sources (StackExchange, GOV.UK) and introduces explicit error subclasses, structured trigger flags, and fine-grained auxiliary judgments (obviousness, severity, localization complexity, contextual dependency, adequacy deviation). These enrichments enable systematic analyses of error risk and intricacy beyond binary detection. The dataset is permanently hosted on GitHub and Hugging Face, accompanied by documentation, annotation guidelines, and baseline scripts. Benchmark experiments with XLM-R and related encoders show substantial performance gains over WMT21 due to balanced labels and refined annotations. We envision SynCED-EnDe as a community resource to advance safe deployment of MT in information retrieval and conversational assistants, particularly in emerging contexts such as wearable AI devices.
InteractBench: Benchmarking LLMs on Competitive Programming under Unrevealed Information
Competitive programming is increasingly being used to evaluate the algorithmic reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on full-information tasks where all problem inputs are provided upfront. This overlooks a critical dimension of algorithmic reasoning: the ability of generated programs to operate when key information is not revealed upfront. Interactive problems, a distinctive component of competitive programming, embody this challenge. These problems require programs to engage in multi-round interaction with an interactor (a judge program) under strict protocol constraints and limited query budgets, with new information revealed only in response to queries. To address this gap, we introduce InteractBench, a benchmark comprising 322 high-quality interactive problems curated from Codeforces, AtCoder, IOI, and ICPC. Each problem is packaged with executable local interactors, enabling fully offline evaluation. Unlike existing benchmarks, InteractBench assesses whether model-generated code can acquire information and track state dynamically. Our evaluation reveals a significant interaction gap: even the most advanced reasoning models achieve limited success on interactive problems. Beyond success rates, we propose a fine-grained failure taxonomy to diagnose the root causes of these deficiencies. Although algorithmic logic errors remain dominant, protocol violations and query-budget overruns are frequent. Code is available at https://github.com/kmsgk0/InteractBench.
CRAFT: Clustering Rubrics to Diagnose Weak LLM Capabilities and Generate Targeted Fine-Tuning Data
Evaluations should do more than measure a models current performance. They should tell us what to fix for the next model iteration and provide a way to generate targeted post training data. Most evaluation pipelines identify weak examples, topics, or categories, but they leave the underlying capability failure implicit: they say where a model fails, not why. We introduce CRAFT, a method that converts any rubric based evaluation dataset into a model specific diagnosis of weak capabilities. CRAFT treats each grading criterion as a capability probe: it extracts a capability description from every prompt rubric pair, clusters these descriptions into a hierarchical capability tree, scores the target model at every node, and selects low performing nodes dynamically across tree levels, at the granularity where each failure is clearest. The selected weak capabilities then direct the generation of targeted supervised finetuning data. Holding the data generation, finetuning, and evaluation setup fixed, we compare CRAFT against prompt level EvalTree clustering and untargeted random generation on four open source models, two professional domains (finance and legal), and 13 held out benchmarks disjoint from the diagnostic data. CRAFT achieves the strongest finance domain average for all four models under repeated temperature decoding; on legal domain, it is strongest for three of four models and remains within the decoding variance bands of the best baseline on the fourth. Diagnosing weaknesses at the level of rubric criteria, rather than prompts or categories, thus yields both a sharper picture of what a model cannot do and measurably better models after finetuning on that diagnosis.
Unmasking and Improving Data Credibility: A Study with Datasets for Training Harmless Language Models
Language models have shown promise in various tasks but can be affected by undesired data during training, fine-tuning, or alignment. For example, if some unsafe conversations are wrongly annotated as safe ones, the model fine-tuned on these samples may be harmful. Therefore, the correctness of annotations, i.e., the credibility of the dataset, is important. This study focuses on the credibility of real-world datasets, including the popular benchmarks Jigsaw Civil Comments, Anthropic Harmless & Red Team, PKU BeaverTails & SafeRLHF, that can be used for training a harmless language model. Given the cost and difficulty of cleaning these datasets by humans, we introduce a systematic framework for evaluating the credibility of datasets, identifying label errors, and evaluating the influence of noisy labels in the curated language data, specifically focusing on unsafe comments and conversation classification. With the framework, we find and fix an average of 6.16% label errors in 11 datasets constructed from the above benchmarks. The data credibility and downstream learning performance can be remarkably improved by directly fixing label errors, indicating the significance of cleaning existing real-world datasets. We provide an open-source tool, Docta, for data cleaning at https://github.com/Docta-ai/docta.
Towards Understanding Bugs in Distributed Training and Inference Frameworks for Large Language Models
With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), distributed training and inference frameworks like DeepSpeed have become essential for scaling model training and inference across multiple GPUs or nodes. However, the increasing complexity of these frameworks brings non-trivial software bugs, which may degrade training performance, cause unexpected failures, and result in significant resource waste. Understanding framework bugs' characteristics is fundamental for quality assurance, allowing the design of more effective debugging and repair methods. Thus, our paper conducts the first large-scale empirical analysis of 308 fixed bugs across three popular distributed training/inference frameworks: DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, and Colossal-AI. We examine bug symptoms, root causes, bug identification and fixing efforts, and common low-effort fixing strategies. Additionally, the distributed nature of these frameworks introduces unique bug root causes, such as allocation strategy error and distributed communication error. Diagnosing and fixing complex bugs remains challenging due to factors like the disconnect between symptoms and root causes, high bug reproduction costs, and low-level or cross-component interactions. Interestingly, we observe that 48% of bug fixes require minimal code changes (<=10 LOC) and follow simple strategies such as conditional logic optimization, parameter handling enhancement, or version compatibility handling, indicating potential for automation. Based on these insights, we offer several implications for improving the reliability of both distributed training and inference frameworks and their dependent LLM projects, while also identifying opportunities to leverage LLM-based tools for automated debugging and repair.
AIC CTU system at AVeriTeC: Re-framing automated fact-checking as a simple RAG task
This paper describes our 3^{rd} place submission in the AVeriTeC shared task in which we attempted to address the challenge of fact-checking with evidence retrieved in the wild using a simple scheme of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) designed for the task, leveraging the predictive power of Large Language Models. We release our codebase and explain its two modules - the Retriever and the Evidence & Label generator - in detail, justifying their features such as MMR-reranking and Likert-scale confidence estimation. We evaluate our solution on AVeriTeC dev and test set and interpret the results, picking the GPT-4o as the most appropriate model for our pipeline at the time of our publication, with Llama 3.1 70B being a promising open-source alternative. We perform an empirical error analysis to see that faults in our predictions often coincide with noise in the data or ambiguous fact-checks, provoking further research and data augmentation.
