来自时间线的证词：基于证据的时间临床假设显著性检验
Testimony from Timelines: Evidence-Grounded Significance Testing of Temporal Clinical Hypotheses
Chengyang He, Wenlong Zhang, Koduvayur Subbalakshmi, Ping Wang
AI 速览：提出STRATA基准和ART范式，对临床时间假设的显著性检验过程进行逐步评分，揭示模型主要失败于证据选择而非结论。
Ask a language model whether sales tend to dip after a product recall, or whether one side effect tends to follow another after a vaccine, and it answers in a fluent sentence that reads like a finding, with no test behind it. Assertions about how events unfold across many cases fill the Web, and each is a temporal hypothesis that only a significance test over the right records can settle. The verifier must specify the null, select the test and decide which records bear on the hypothesis, and any of these choices can go wrong while the conclusion still comes out right. Yet benchmarks for language-model data analysis grade only the conclusion, with the relevant data handed over. We study the problem in health, where a wrong verdict is costly, and present STRATA, a benchmark that grades every decision on the way to a verdict: 8,735 hypotheses over the clinical timelines of vaccine adverse-event reports, with gold plans, evidence sets, p-values and verdicts derived under a released codebook and reproduced by a deterministic oracle. We also propose ART (articulate, retrieve, test), a staged paradigm that exposes each decision as an inspectable output. Extensive experiments with five model configurations show that systems fail mostly at choosing which records count, a verdict-evidence gap that accuracy alone conceals. ART closes most of this gap and brings a 31B open model to within 0.01 of the frontier models under the same paradigm; the frontier models succeed once given the codebook.