Qazi Mamunur Rashid, Xuan Yang, Zhengzhe Yang, Yanzhou Pan, Erin van Liemt, Darlene Neal, Kshitij Pancholi
原文摘要
Recent advancements in generative AI facilitate large-scale synthetic data genera- tion for model evaluation. However, without targeted approaches, these datasets often lack the sociotechnical nuance required for sensitive domains. We introduce NodeSyn, an evidence-grounded methodology that generates socially relevant syn- thetic queries by leveraging a fine-tuned taxonomy generator (TaG) anchored in real-world evidence. Evaluated against four mainstream LLMs, NodeSyn elicited failure rates up to five times higher than human-authored benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that our granular taxonomic expansion significantly drives these failure rates, while independent validation reveals critical deficiencies in prominent guard models.
Predicting how many tokens a large language model (LLM) will decode, using only prefill-phase hidden states, is a key primitive for inference scheduling. We show that current benchmarks conflate predictor quality with task hardness: when the target model, dataset, or sampling configuration changes, reported accuracy collapses even though the predictor is unchanged. We trace this instability to an overlooked error source---the inherent stochasticity of autoregressive decoding---and derive bounds that every prefill-side method must obey. Our analysis treats decoding as a stopped stochastic process. The per-step stopping probability of a response is not constant but ramps up over hundreds of steps, so the decode length inherits a central limit theorem from the many local decisions that determine where a response ends; this yields per-prompt normality with an explicit error term, together with an affine variance law $σ=αμ+b$ whose slope is the coefficient of variation of the number of response segments. Empirically, the normal law reproduces the per-prompt MAE and the central mass of the decode-length distribution to within a few percent, and the residual departures from normality (mild right skew, slight excess kurtosis) are the ones predicted by the sampling-noise correction. Under fixed model, data, and sampling conditions, a broad design space of predictors (MLP, EGTP, FiLM, soft-label, and Mixture-of-Experts variants) converges to similar performance close to the bound, confirming that \emph{system error dominates model error}. We argue for a benchmarking protocol that fixes the model, data, and sampling parameters and that reports relative-error metrics alongside absolute ones. Code and analysis tools are available at https://github.com/ShwStone/DecodingPredict.
Chen Xu, Yu Ji Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhenyu Lyu, Yang Yi, Yizhe Yang, Luyao Ji, Chaoyi Chen, Xianyang Wang 等 15 位作者
原文摘要
The critical therapist shortage demands scalable training solutions. Standardized Patients, the gold standard, are scarce and costly. Current LLM-based approaches focus on patient simulation for conversational realism but lack pedagogical rigor as Virtual Standardized Patients, lacking faithful reactions to clinical errors and explainable feedback. To bridge this gap, we propose PUPPET, the first neural-symbolic Virtual Standardized Patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture. PUPPET externalizes LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic (propositional logic) and patient mental states (state machine). This allows PUPPET to behave coherently with controllable and explainable psychological dynamics: intervention logic (OBSERVE) → state transition (THINK) → response (BEHAVE). Our PUPPET-TRAINER further leverages this chain to educate trainees about intervention consequences, standardizing and scaling mental health training. Experiments across three clinical scenarios confirm that PUPPET outperforms baselines in clinical faithfulness and pedagogical value.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表