LLM Decision-Making

LLM: Large Language Model

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28 papers in the last four weeks, up 460% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 126

Jun 30, 2026cs.GR

LLM-Driven Personalities for Decision Making in Emergency Simulations

For virtual humans to appear believable, they must exhibit agency and spatial awareness while interacting with their environment in ways that reflect competence and intelligence. At the core of these capabilities lies effective decision-making, which strongly shapes agent behavior. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly been explored as a mechanism to support such decision-making processes. In this work, we investigate the use of LLMs to drive decision-making in virtual humans within a simulated evacuation scenario, incorporating OCEAN personality traits into agent representations. Our goal is to evaluate how personality, expressed through language-based prompts, influences both individual behaviors and collective simulation outcomes. Our results demonstrate that LLM-driven personality profiles significantly impact agents' decisions, leading to distinct behavioral patterns across different traits. These findings suggest that heterogeneous crowds composed of LLM-guided agents can enhance the realism and variability of simulated environments, offering a flexible alternative to traditional rule-based approaches.

Stefano Calzolari, Rubens Montanha, Gabriel Schneider +5

Politecnico di Torino · PUCRS

Personality Modeling in Language Models Human Behavior Simulation Agent-Based Modeling LLM Decision-Making

Jun 30, 2026cs.LG

Teaching LLMs to Recommend and Defer in Underrepresented Epilepsy Care

Specialist epilepsy expertise is scarce in resource-constrained settings, making LLM-based decision support attractive for frontline clinicians managing longitudinal treatment. Such systems must adapt to local prescribing practice and know when to defer. We study this problem in Ugandan pediatric epilepsy care, predicting anti-seizure medication regimens from longitudinal unstructured clinic notes. Standard prompting achieves non-trivial agreement with physician prescriptions, but neurologist review shows that many errors reflect distribution-miscalibrated prescribing defaults rather than failures to parse the local record. We introduce MANANA, a non-parametric prompt-learning framework that learns local prescribing guidance from a small patient-level training set. MANANA converts observed prescription errors into auditable prompt memories, instantiated in single-agent and multi-agent variants, and improves over classical ML models, direct LLM prompting, and prompt-optimization baselines across two independently collected Ugandan cohorts. We further propose Bayesian prompt averaging, which converts the learned prompt trajectory into prescription likelihoods and an uncertainty-based deferral signal. On the independently collected held-out cohort, this improves visit-level top-3 prescription accuracy by 4-8 percentage points over prompt-optimization baselines and enables selective prediction: the system can auto-handle the most confident half of cases at 95% precision, or the most confident quarter at 99% precision, while deferring lower-confidence cases for specialist review.

Shreyas Rajesh, Kartik Sharma, Tonmoy Monsoor +8

Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles · Makerere University · St. Francis Hospital Nsambya +1

Prompt Learning Selective Prediction LLM Decision-Making Longitudinal EHR Modeling Medical LLMs

Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Uncertainty-Aware Generation and Decision-Making Under Ambiguity

With rapidly improving capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in many complex real-world tasks. Beyond requiring in-depth knowledge and reasoning skills, many of these tasks exhibit a high degree of subjectivity and require that the outputs of the model can be trusted. While a lot of progress has been made to train better models, decision-making algorithms have received less attention. In this work, we present and evaluate various uncertainty-aware decision-making algorithms based on Bayesian decision theory and risk-averse decision making on the tasks of tutoring and automatic peer reviewing. Concretely, we take uncertainty over tutoring strategies and review scores into account when generating a tutor response or review and use conformal prediction to provide guarantees over strategy and score. We find empirically that these algorithms can improve the utility of the generations but need to be carefully implemented when ambiguity is high. For example, risk-averse rules can degrade performance by optimizing for generic outputs, while Bayesian methods tend to perform better. Our work uses techniques from decision theory to improve LLM-based decision-making and outlines open challenges for the community.

Nico Daheim, Iryna Gurevych

Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab), Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt · National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, Germany

Intelligent Tutoring Systems LLM Decision-Making Bayesian Decision Theory LLM Uncertainty Estimation Automated Peer Review Decision-Making under Uncertainty

Jun 29, 2026cs.CY

Can LLMs Rank? A Tale of Triads and Triage

From housing allocation for households experiencing homelessness to triage in emergency departments, LLMs are increasingly being considered as judges of consequential decisions that require ranking people for scarce resources. Ranking large groups simultaneously is cognitively demanding and error-prone. A natural solution, drawing on decades of social choice theory, elicits pairwise comparisons and aggregates them into a total order. However, a fundamental question remains when LLMs serve as the pairwise judge: how can a practitioner tell, before committing to a ranking, whether the LLM's judgments are sufficiently consistent to trust the result? We discuss two different ways of identifying consistency. A classical diagnostic, the coefficient of consistency

ζ

, originally developed to measure judge reliability by counting circular triads in tournament graphs, provides a cheap, model-free measure of intra-run consistency. Various standard measures of distance between rankings, for example Kendall's

τ

, can measure inter-run variability. We show, in both theory and practice, that these measures are independently valuable, and advocate for using both to assess reliability of rankings. We demonstrate the practical importance of our results across two high-stakes prioritization tasks: homelessness service allocation and emergency department triage. Three different leading LLMs have considerably different performance profiles across these two axes of consistency. We provide guidelines for how practitioners could think about measuring and assessing consistency before committing to a model for ranking or prioritization.

Gaurab Pokharel, Shafkat Farabi, Patrick J. Fowler +1

Virginia Tech Alexandria, VA · Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO

Pairwise Comparison Social Choice Theory Pairwise Preference Evaluation Pairwise Ranking LLM Reliability LLM Decision-Making+1

Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

Open Problems in Constitutional Preference Reconstruction

Pairwise preference data is widely used for training and evaluating language models (e.g., RLHF), but each datapoint records a \emph{choice}, not the rationale behind it. Methods such as Inverse Constitutional AI (ICAI) attempt to improve interpretability by compressing datasets into short ``constitutions'' of natural-language principles. We argue this framing is under-specified: a flat list of principles is not yet an executable decision rule because it leaves principle composition implicit. We use the pairwise setting as a testbed to empirically characterize three open problems in constitutional methods. First, principle quality is hard to measure: coverage and accuracy are useful but incomplete proxies for end-to-end reconstruction. Second, \emph{composition is ambiguous}: holding principles fixed, different executors (LLM judge versus majority vote) agree only

73\%

of the time. Third, \emph{constitutions differ between LLMs}: cross-model vote agreement is

73\%

, whereas intra-model agreement is

81\%

. Across PRISM, AlpacaEval, and Chatbot Arena, we show that principle refinement (ICAI+) may be a first step towards ameliorating these problems: inter-executor agreement rises to

78\%

, and transparent executors match LLM judge accuracy (

66\%

vs.\

67\%

). Our results highlight that constitutions should be evaluated as \emph{constitution--executor systems}, with implications for LLMs-as-a-judge broadly.

Eleanor Clifford, Michael Amir, Arduin Findeis +2

Imperial College London · University of Cambridge

LLM-as-a-Judge LLM Decision-Making Preference Alignment

Jun 28, 2026cs.AI

Budgeted Act-or-Defer Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation with Local Reliability Bounds

Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review. We formulate this as budgeted act-or-defer decision making. At each round, the system maps the debate prefix to a low-dimensional state, computes a

k

-nearest-neighbor lower confidence bound on state-conditional correctness using calibration data, and acts only when the bound exceeds a user-specified reliability threshold. The certificate controls wrong actions through the decomposition

β= δ+ α+ \varepsilon_{\mathrm{act}}

, separating calibration failure, residual action risk, and representation gap. The guarantee is conditional, not distribution-free: it relies on a valid local bias envelope and an action-region representation-gap bound, and each assumption is paired with falsification-style diagnostics. Because the same absolute wrong-action budget has different meanings across tasks of different difficulty, we set budgets relative to each task's final-round error using training data only, and evaluate safety by normalized budget usage

\mathrm{WA}/β

. On six benchmarks against nine baselines, the method uses 9--12% of the pre-declared budget on activated datasets, reaching up to 84% automation and 96% acted-on accuracy; on stress-test datasets, it defers rather than forcing unreliable automation. Rather than relying on per-task post-hoc threshold search, the method prospectively converts a user-declared wrong-action budget into an auditable act-or-defer operating point before deployment, under explicitly stated assumptions.

Mengdie Flora Wang, Haochen Xie, Guanghui Wang +2

1AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, USA · General Motors (GM), USA

AI Agent Reliability Multi-Agent LLM Systems Selective Prediction LLM Decision-Making LLM Agent Reliability

Jun 28, 2026cs.RO

Understanding LLM Intervention Explanations in Multi-Party Human-Robot Interaction

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in social robots to support natural group interactions, yet their role in complex multi-party settings remains underexplored. In particular, it is unclear how LLM-driven robots decide when and why to intervene in group conversations. This paper investigates the intervention explanations generated by an LLM-based orchestrator in a multi-party interaction involving three human participants and two robots. We conducted a between-subjects study with 24 groups (66 university students), comparing a homogeneous condition (two robots with the same role, i.e., a mover) and a heterogeneous condition (two robots with different roles, i.e., a mover and an opposer). At each conversational turn, the LLM orchestrator decided whether to intervene and generated a textual explanation of its decision. We performed a thematic analysis of 610 intervention explanations, identifying five recurring themes. Results show that explanations are facilitation-oriented, emphasizing agreement, participation, and interaction flow. While patterns remain stable across conditions, role differentiation emerges: the mover supports coordination, whereas the opposer drives goal-oriented interventions. These findings contribute to explainable AI by characterizing how LLM-driven systems justify intervention decisions in real-time, multi-party human-robot interaction.

Micol Spitale, Massimiliano Nigro, Emily Cross

Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy · GESS Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Explainable Artificial Intelligence Spoken Dialogue Systems LLM Decision-Making Human-Robot Interaction

Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Deterministic Decisions for High-Stakes AI. A Zero-Egress Pipeline with the Deployability of RAG and the Accuracy of Machine Learning

We identify intervention bias as a previously unquantified failure mode of zero-shot large-language-model (LLM) educational advisory agents: without task-specific training, they recommend action when a hindsight-optimal oracle policy mandates inaction. In a six-arm ablation on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (N=800 students, four temporal cutoffs), at day 56 -- when the oracle designates 70.1% of students as needing no intervention -- zero-shot GPT-4o recommends action for 73%, a 43 percentage-point false-positive rate. Commercial RAG and SQL-augmented retrieval are comparably miscalibrated; at 10,000 students this implies about 4,300 unnecessary advisor contacts per cycle. Supervised policy learning eliminates this bias: a trajectory-conditioned ONNX Decision Transformer (DT) and a snapshot XGBoost classifier, trained on the same oracle-labelled trajectories under strict prefix-only features, both achieve near-zero calibration error. The DT reaches macro-F1 0.79 (macro-recall 0.85) across all five action classes, predicting even the rare load-reduction action without collapsing, at a 0% action flip rate and sub-5 ms CPU decision latency. The two supervised arms are on par; the DT's edge over XGBoost at the final cutoff is indicative only (unpaired across cohorts). Scope: we validate Stage-2 decision-making (EAV state vector to supervised policy) under controlled oracle input from structured OULAD data; high fidelity reflects feature-oracle alignment, not general high-stakes-AI capability. The most robust finding is the intervention-bias contrast, not the absolute accuracies. We also show an Evaluation Gap: LLM-as-judge scoring (DeepEval G-Eval) is blind to intervention bias, rewarding fluent over-prescription rather than decision quality.

Craig Atkinson

Verificate Pty Ltd, Sydney, Australia

AI in Education LLM Decision-Making Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

Measuring Behavior Portability in Large Language Models

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision makers, yet the behavioral mapping they exhibit can vary substantially across decision environments that are payoff-equivalent by construction-environments that share identical payoff-relevant structure but differ in surface presentation. This sensitivity renders suite-based evaluation fragile and raises a fundamental question of behavioral portability: how well does a behavioral mapping learned in one decision environment informative on another that preserves the same underlying incentive structure? We introduce a formal framework to measure this property. Our protocol fits an interpretable behavioral model on data pooled from a set of source environments and evaluates its out-of-sample predictive performance in a held-out target environment, benchmarking against an oracle trained directly on target data. Portability is quantified via a loss-agnostic measure that delivers worst-case bounds on the performance of the induced prediction-action mapping in the target environment. In controlled experiments spanning seven canonical economic decision problems, we document substantial and systematic portability losses, suggesting that behavioral characterizations of LLMs obtained in one decision environment cannot be assumed to transfer reliably to structurally equivalent alternatives.

Tianjia Dong, Nadav Kunievsky, James A. Evans

Knowledge Lab University of Chicago

LLM Evaluation LLM Decision-Making

Jun 17, 2026cs.CL

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

Leyang Shen, Yang Zhang, Xiaoyan Zhao +2

National University of Singapore Singapore

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Decision-Making Multi-Agent Reasoning

Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

LLM Consumer Behavior Theory: Foundations of a Novel Research Field

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users. This shift raises fundamental questions for consumer theory, which has traditionally modeled humans as the primary decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce LLM Consumer Behavior Theory, a new field of study concerned with analyzing consumer behavior in agentic markets. Drawing on classical and behavioral economics alongside recent advances in Natural Language Processing, we formalize how human preferences are reflected and acted upon by LLM-based agents, and how agent-level decisions aggregate into market demand. We unify previously fragmented literature on LLM decision-making, human behavior simulation, and preference elicitation under a common economic lens, highlighting where assumptions, such as rationality and heterogeneity, may fail in agentic markets. Rather than providing empirical validation, this paper outlines the scope of LLM consumer behavior and identifies open research questions related to alignment, preference representation, and market dynamics.

Manon Reusens, Sofie Goethals, David Martens

Department of Engineering Management, University of Antwerp

Human Preference Modeling LLM Decision-Making

Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation -- the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration -- the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

Yuyang Dai, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian +1

1MBZUAI · 2Yale University

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Decision-Making Multi-Agent LLMs

Jun 14, 2026cs.AI

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

Linghua Zhang, Jun Wang, Jingtong Wu +1

Ant Group · City University of Hong Kong

Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Decision-Making

Jun 9, 2026cs.AI

Knowing When to Ask: Self-Gated Clarification for Hierarchical Language Agents

In hierarchical reasoning, failures often originate at intermediate decision points where the agent commits to a wrong branch without recognizing that it lacks critical information. Rather than treating clarification as an external uncertainty trigger, we propose ACTION-RATING, a formulation that places it inside the agent's action space on a shared ordinal scale with navigation, so that asking competes directly with acting at every decision point and help-seeking becomes observable at intermediate states. Two structurally distinct information-seeking modes emerge from the agent's own ratings: mandatory (no viable branch) and opportunistic (residual uncertainty despite a leading candidate). On Harmonized Tariff Schedule classification (30,000-node taxonomy, three benchmarks, 9~LLMs across 4 families), we observe a regime shift from mandatory to opportunistic clarification, with Information-Seeking Effectiveness (ISE), a local diagnostic defined as the fraction of help interactions followed by a correct next navigation step (not a final-task metric), rising from 50% to 74%. Three diagnostic contrasts fail to reproduce this structure. A separability test shows that the information-seeking pattern (mode split, ISE ranking) persists when answer quality is degraded (-18.8% accuracy), supporting an empirical separation between where an agent seeks help and the quality of the help it receives. Under the controlled answer channel, accuracy gains reach +16.2% at 10-digit; we read this as an upper bound on what better localization could unlock, not a deployment estimate.

Aijing Gao, Yiming Kang, Mengdie Flora Wang +1

Amazon Web Services

Hierarchical Classification LLM Decision-Making LLM Agents

Jun 9, 2026cs.AI

Superficial Beliefs in LLM Decision-Making

We ask whether large language models (LLMs) merely imitate rationales when choosing between two options, or whether their choices reflect a systematic underlying decision structure. Using synthetic binary decision settings in which models choose between profiles defined by graded attributes, we compare the attribute a model says mattered most with the attribute that best explains its choice under a behavioural model fit to prior decisions. The behavioural model predicts held-out choices well, showing that model behaviour is systematically related to the visible attributes rather than being random. However, direct self-reports and a separate score-based judge recover the behaviourally inferred driver only partially. The resulting picture is neither one of arbitrary behaviour nor one of fully articulated belief - outputs are structured enough to support prediction, but explicit reasons track the recovered driver only imperfectly. This qualitative pattern persists across prompt-order and sampling perturbations, alternative behavioural models, targeted occlusion analyses, and structurally varied decision settings. We interpret this as evidence for ``superficial belief'' in LLM decision-making: models behave as if guided by probabilistic local priorities over attributes, while having only limited verbal access to the attributes that drive their decisions.

Gabriel Freedman, Francesca Toni

Department of Computing Imperial College London

LLM Decision-Making Metacognition in Language Models

Jun 9, 2026cs.AI

Trace2Policy: From Expert Behavior Traces to Self-Evolving Decision Agents

Decision rules that enterprise experts apply tacitly -- in auditing, compliance, and contract review -- can be systematically recovered and improved through iterative error analysis. We present \textbf{Trace2Policy}, whose core mechanism -- \textbf{EISR} (\textbf{E}rror-driven \textbf{I}terative \textbf{S}kill \textbf{R}efinement) -- maintains a human-readable rule document as its optimization target: each round executes the rules on a validation set, clusters errors by root cause into MISSING, WRONG, or CONFLICT types, applies targeted patches, and commits only those that pass a regression gate. \textbf{For this class of compliance-sensitive, skewed-base-rate decision tasks, we identify rule quality -- not model capability -- as the dominant performance lever}: across five LLMs, one-shot distillation plateaus near

\sim

70% on the deployed pool, while eight EISR rounds lift the same rules to 79.6% when compiled into deterministic Python -- zero LLM calls at inference. \textbf{Execution form compounds the gain: in production, the same EISR-refined content runs 9.8~pp higher as compiled Python than as an LLM prompt, a form-and-engineering bundle the 22-day deployment matured together.} Deployed for 22 days at a major logistics carrier (3,349 audit cases), the compiled pipeline outperforms the pure-LLM baseline it replaced (72.7%); on these calibrated, skewed-base-rate workloads, re-enabling LLM fallback monotonically degrades accuracy. An LLM-driven variant, \textbf{Auto-EISR}, reproduces this refinement at $5--$10 per cycle versus

\sim

70 expert-hours, and transfers to four public benchmarks spanning legal reasoning (LegalBench) and process-mining decisions (BPIC 2012) without re-engineering.

Junli Zha, Jinbo Wang, Chao Zhou +1

SF Express

LLM Decision-Making Iterative Refinement

Jun 6, 2026cs.AI

To Nuke or Not to Nuke: LLMs' (Missing) Ethical Reasoning and Actions in a High-Stakes Decision-Making Simulation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as long-horizon agents with decision-making capacities. While LLMs can show ethical competence on dilemmas such as trolley problems, this competence may not translate to complex, agentic scenarios. We study this gap in Civilization V, a multiplayer game with a complex decision-making landscape including economy, diplomacy, technology, and military strategy. Starting from 130 high-tension LLM self-play episodes, in which an LLM player spontaneously escalated nuclear authorization, we replay them across 13 models with three prompt interventions: an ethical prompt naming nuclear harm, removal of the previous model's decision-making rationale, and high-stakes framing emphasizing real-world impacts. No interventions nor their combinations reliably eliminate emergent escalation. We identify three failure pathways: ethical reasoning that fails to surface without prompting, fails to appear even when prompted, or surfaces but fails to take effect when strategic counter-factors dominate. Evaluations of agentic models, therefore, must test whether ethical reasoning is spontaneously invoked and behaviorally effective in complex decision-making contexts, beyond whether it can be elicited in isolation.

John Chen, Sihan Cheng, Can Gurkan +1

University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA · Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Moral Reasoning in Language Models LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Decision-Making Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Jun 5, 2026cs.AI

Online Pandora's Box for Contextual LLM Cascading

Motivated by Large Language Model (LLM) cascading, we propose an online contextual Pandora's Box model for adaptively querying and selecting LLM APIs. In each period, a decision-maker observes a request context and faces a two-phase decision problem. In the query phase, the decision-maker sequentially queries APIs, where each query reveals a generated output and the decision-maker incurs an (output-dependent) cost. In the selection phase, the decision-maker selects one of the generated outputs to deploy and observes only the downstream reward of the deployed output. This output-mediated feedback structure differs from classical online contextual Pandora's Box models, in which opening a box directly reveals its reward. Rather than estimating the full conditional output and cost distributions of each API, we directly model the reservation index and develop a learning approach for the query phase. Specifically, we impose a parametric structure on the contextual reservation index functions induced by the classical Weitzman's policy. Our policy combines generalized method of moments (GMM) type estimation of these reservation indices with UCB-style confidence bounds for both these indices and the shared output-level reward evaluator. Under regularity conditions, we prove that the resulting policy achieves dimension-dependent

\widetilde O(\sqrt T)

cumulative regret over a horizon of

T

periods.

Alexandre Belloni, Yan Chen, Yehua Wei

The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

LLM Decision-Making LLM Routing Contextual Bandits

Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

PandaAI: A Practical Agent CQ2 for Neuro-symbolic Data Analysis And Integrated Decision-Making in Quantitative Finance

While deep learning has excelled in various domains, its application to sequential decision-making in finance remains challenging due to the low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and non-stationarity of financial data. Leveraging the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose \textbf{PandaAI}, a closed-loop neuro-symbolic LLM agent with market regime modeling and constrained alpha generation, which bridges general LLM reasoning with financial rigor and suppresses the financial toxicity of LLM-generated outputs. To bridge the gap between general linguistic capability and financial rigor, we fine-tune a domain-specific LLM. Furthermore, we integrate this LLM into a modular architecture and form a closed-loop system. Unlike traditional models that optimize isolated prediction metrics, \textbf{PandaAI} is designed as a neuro-symbolic agent that navigates the complex, real-world financial environment with explicit risk awareness. Extensive experiments on CSI 300 stock data show that \textbf{PandaAI} achieves a

18.2\%

higher Rank IC and

25.7\%

lower maximum drawdown than state-of-the-art time-series models. Our constrained LLM generation and dual-channel adaptation method provide a general paradigm for LLM deployment in high-stakes sequential decision-making scenarios.

Yuqi Li, Siyuan Liu, Bingjun Liu

Panda AI

Quantitative Finance LLM Decision-Making LLM Agents Neuro-Symbolic AI Finance Algorithmic Trading

Jun 4, 2026cs.AI

An Infectious Disease Spread Simulation Based on Large Language Model Decision Making

Modelling individual decision-making during infectious disease outbreaks is crucial for understanding behavioural dynamics and informing effective public health interventions. Prior work has shown that large language models can simulate realistic human behaviour by generating agent decisions based on demographic prompts and situational context. We build on this foundation with a spatially grounded, agent-based simulation framework that integrates LLM-generated decisions about self-reported influenza-like illness into a census-based synthetic population of agents. Location is treated as a central feature: agents are assigned to spatial units within cities, capturing the spatial distributions of different demographic groups using real-world census data and enabling geographically diverse behavioural modelling. We implement and compare three decision scenarios, independent reasoning, household influence, and message framing, and simulate self-reporting outcomes in San Francisco and Atlanta. Results reveal that income and education are the dominant drivers of reporting rate variation, with smaller but consistent effects from geography, LLM model choice, and message framing. Our framework generates synthetic data that captures both social and geographic heterogeneity, supporting spatial epidemiological modelling and bias-aware behavioural analysis.

Yonchanok Khaokaew, Ruochen Kong, Andreas Zufle +6

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty of Engineering The University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia · King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok (KMUTNB) · Department of Computer Science Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, USA +5

Human Behavior Simulation Agent-Based Modeling LLM Decision-Making

Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

Probing Outcome-Level Resemblance and Mechanism-Level Alignment in LLM Risk Decisions: Evidence from the St. Petersburg Game

LLMs can appear cautious in risk decision-making tasks, yet cautious-looking outputs do not necessarily indicate alignment with human decision-making mechanisms. We investigate this distinction using the St. Petersburg game as a controlled testbed, a classical paradox in which the expected payoff is infinite, yet humans typically report low, finite willingness to pay. We evaluate 28 LLMs with a structured prompt suite that includes the original game; controlled decision variants that perturb truncation, repeated play, numeric endowment, and occupational identity; a human-perspective prompt that asks models to reason as human decision makers; and paired comparisons between base models and their instruction-tuned counterparts. In the original game, most models generate finite bids, creating the appearance of human-like risk behavior. However, this outcome-level resemblance masks substantial mechanism-level differences. The controlled variants reveal that rather than maintaining human-like behavior seen in the original game, models often shift to conditionally and computationally rational behavior. Human-cue prompting and instruction tuning often lower bids and reduce some visible pathologies, but most mechanism-level response patterns remain largely unchanged. These findings show that behavioral alignment in risk decision-making can be surface-level: LLMs may produce human-like risk decisions without exhibiting human-consistent mechanisms. High-stakes evaluations of LLM decision-making should therefore move beyond outcome similarity and examine whether the alignment is supported by mechanism-level consistency.

Chensong Huang, Changyu Chen, Chenwei Lin +3

Fudan University · University of Rochester

LLM Alignment LLM Decision-Making Human-AI Decision Making Decision-Making under Uncertainty

Jun 2, 2026cs.CL

Can I Take Another Dose? Evaluating LLM Decision-Making Under Temporal Uncertainty in OTC Dosing QA

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for everyday health questions, including whether a user can safely take another dose of an over-the-counter (OTC) medication. Yet this common safety-relevant setting remains underexplored in existing medical QA evaluations, where correct answers require tracking dose timing, computing rolling 24-hour intake, following product-label constraints, and handling incomplete medication histories. We introduce DOSEBENCH, a focused benchmark of 81 curated OTC dosing scenarios focused on adult acetaminophen and ibuprofen use, with manually annotated gold references. We evaluate four LLMs across repeated runs using metrics for decision correctness, consistency, explanation verifiability, failure types, and confidence-related signals, resulting in 1,620 model responses. Our results show that models frequently struggle with rolling-window reasoning and ambiguity-sensitive cases and that stable or confident-looking responses can still violate dosing constraints. These findings suggest that OTC dosing QA provides a narrow yet practical testbed for evaluating temporal reasoning, constraint following, and safety-relevant uncertainty handling in medical QA.

Maroof Kousar, Yibo Hu

Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL, USA

Temporal Reasoning Medical QA LLM Decision-Making LLM Safety Evaluation

Jun 1, 2026q-fin.GN

Auditing Asset-Specific Preferences in Financial Large Language Models: Evidence from Bitcoin Representations and Portfolio Allocation

Large language models now power robo-advisors and trading agents, yet whether they carry built-in biases toward specific assets is largely untested. We ask three questions: do LLMs systematically prefer certain financial instruments; can an internal representation with causal leverage over those preferences be identified; and does that representation affect downstream financial decisions? We develop a three-level audit protocol and apply it to Bitcoin. First, a behavioral audit of nine frontier LLMs shows that Bitcoin's ranking among money-like instruments is frame-dependent: models place it around rank 5 of 8 as "reliable money" but near the top under crisis and autonomous-agent frames, and an attribute-swap experiment shows that rankings track functional properties, not names. Second, we open a model's internals: a search across thousands of sparse-autoencoder features in Gemma 3 identifies a dominant Bitcoin-selective feature. Amplifying it shifts the model toward the asset and suppressing it shifts the model away, even when "Bitcoin" never appears in the prompt. Third, we test financial consequences: amplification raises Bitcoin's portfolio share by 5.2 percentage points while suppression lowers it by 4.6 pp, with amplification reallocating within crypto and suppression cutting total crypto exposure. We characterize this as bounded behavioral leverage (leverage meaning causal influence over outputs, not financial leverage): an identifiable internal feature can be perturbed to move financial choices, but only within measurable limits. The framework links internal representations to external recommendations, validated with random controls and mechanism boundaries. As LLMs become autonomous financial agents, this is a first step toward a behavioral layer for emerging know-your-agent (KYA) standards: knowing what an agent prefers, and how far that preference can be moved.

Wenbin Wu

Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, University of Cambridge

LLM Auditing LLM Decision-Making Causal Interventions in Language Models Finance Financial Decision-Making

Jun 1, 2026cs.CL

Do Gender Cues Affect LLM Value Trade-offs? Evidence from a Controlled Decision Benchmark

Large language models are increasingly used in value-sensitive decision settings, where irrelevant demographic cues should not alter judgments. We construct the Realistic Value Decision Benchmark (RVDB), a controlled benchmark that varies only the role-gender configuration while holding the scenario, ordered value pair, roles, candidate decisions, Value Distance, and Decision Severity fixed. Using a position-balanced evaluation across seven models, we test whether models preserve decision invariance under gender perturbations and whether their self-attributions reflect observed behavioral changes. We find that explicit gender cues induce bounded but systematic decision flips, including under an explicit gender-attribution prompt that asks models to report whether gender influenced their choice. Cross-gender role swaps reveal a consistent female-proposed-decision asymmetry, while models often attribute flipped decisions to No Influence or other non-gender factors. Further analysis shows that gender effects concentrate near less determinate value boundaries and under more severe decision contexts, suggesting that gender cues act as local boundary-shifting factors rather than global overrides of value reasoning. Value rankings remain largely stable, but ordered value-pair trade-offs shift unevenly across role-gender configurations. These results show that gender can enter LLM value trade-offs behaviorally while remaining obscured in self-attribution, motivating controlled behavioral audits beyond explanation-based evaluation.

Yangyang Liu, Dong Yu, Pengyuan Liu

Beijing Language and Culture University

Gender Bias in Language Models Moral Reasoning in Language Models LLM Auditing LLM Decision-Making Language Model Bias Evaluation

May 30, 2026cs.AI

Adversarial Feeds Steer LLM Agent Decisions Against Their Defaults

LLM agents increasingly act after consuming ranked external information streams such as social feeds, search results, retrieval contexts, and email queues, yet safety evaluations almost always test the model or the user prompt in isolation, never the upstream ranker that decides what the agent reads just before it acts. We introduce a controlled protocol that holds the model, persona, topic, and final decision prompt fixed and varies only the composition and ordering of the posts an agent encounters during a preceding ten-turn "scrolling" phase, isolating the causal effect of feed curation on a downstream decision. Across 2,785 decision rollouts on four modern open instruct LLMs from three independent labs, we identify three response regimes: adversarial capitulation, default saturation, and a default-direction asymmetry in which a one-sided feed tips a decision the model was genuinely uncertain about (in the clearest cases from 5% to 100%; Fisher p as low as 3 x 10^-10) but cannot dislodge one it already favors or holds firmly. The effect follows a dose-response curve, survives a generator swap that rules out a writing-style artifact, generalizes across several decision domains including security-relevant choices such as removing a deployment approval gate or relaxing access controls, and is partly mitigated by two simple feed-level defenses; a frontier model retains its default. We characterize the recommender as a practical, default-bounded control surface for LLM agents, and argue that agent evaluations must audit the feed layer rather than the final prompt alone.

Rana Muhammad Usman

Independent Researcher

Adversarial Attacks on LLMs LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Decision-Making LLM Agent Safety

May 30, 2026cs.AI

ForeSci: Evaluating LLM Agents for Forward-Looking AI Research Judgment

AI research often requires decisions before future evidence exists: which bottleneck to attack, which direction to pursue, or where a project should be positioned. We introduce ForeSci, a temporally controlled benchmark for evaluating whether LLM agents can make such forward-looking research judgements from historical evidence. ForeSci contains 500 tasks across four fast-moving AI domains and four decision families. Each task is paired with a cutoff-aligned offline knowledge base; post-cutoff papers are hidden during generation and used only for validation. To avoid random future-event prediction, tasks are derived from pre-cutoff taxonomy branches and evidence signals, and answer-generation backbones are selected to precede the task cutoffs. We evaluate native LLMs, Hybrid RAG, and three research-agent adaptations across four backbones. Results show that explicit evidence organization improves traceability and factual support, but gains depend strongly on the decision family. Diagnostics reveal a recurring evidence-decision decoupling: agents may cite relevant evidence while forecasting the wrong research object. ForeSci turns forward-looking AI research judgement into a controlled benchmark for evaluating research agents as decision-making systems.

Qiuyu Tian, Haojie Yin, Yingce Xia +2

1Southeast University, Nanjing, China · 3Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, China · 2Beijing Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Decision-Making

May 30, 2026cs.AI

Doing What They Say, Not What They Reason: Locating the Faithfulness Gap in LLM Agents

Do LLM agents act on the reasoning they state? This question of process fidelity is central to LLM-based social simulation, yet hard to measure where no reference for correct behavior exists. We study it in a controlled setting: a Texas Poker simulator with a verifiable reference action for every decision by splitting the faithfulness gap into two steps: reasoning-to-conclusion (does the stated decision follow from the agent's own reasoning?) and conclusion-to-action (does the agent execute what it states?). The two steps behave very differently. Conclusion-to-action is reliable: inconsistency is 0.7% for Claude Haiku 4.5 and 1.4% for DeepSeek-Reasoner once the conclusion is read from an explicit tag, whereas free-text conclusion extraction reports 22-26%. Reasoning-to-conclusion is where fidelity frays, but not through a single dominant failure. In a step-level diagnostic the agent's errors split roughly evenly between bad inputs, borderline cases, and rule misapplication deriving a conclusion that contradicts the agent's own restated rule from inputs it estimated correctly. This composition is model-dependent: rule misapplication accounts for a third of Haiku's interpretable errors but only 8% of DeepSeek's. The one robust signal is directional: when an agent does misapply its own stated rule, it almost always (99.5% for Haiku) errs in the risk-averse direction. The override is partly hedging behavior, not a capability limit: instructing the agent to apply the rule mechanically halves the misapplication rate (13.9% to 6.8% of decisions) and raises adherence by eight points. Process-fidelity evaluation should therefore elicit machine-checkable conclusions and probe for directional biases rather than assume a single upstream failure mode, lest it conflate measurement noise with model behavior.

Yufeng Wang

AI Agent Reliability LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Decision-Making Agentic Reasoning LLM Reasoning

May 28, 2026cs.CL

Adaptive Interviewing for Persona Simulation in LLMs: Evidence-Grounded Reasoning Improves Decision Alignment

Accurately simulating the decisions of a specific individual remains challenging for large language models (LLMs), partly because persona information is often provided as static descriptions that miss the values, experiences, and contextual cues needed for individual-level decision simulation. We propose an adaptive interview framework that gathers persona-relevant information through a structured three-stage dialogue: core questions, dynamic follow-ups, and a synthesized personality summary. Using the resulting interview transcripts, we evaluate whether LLMs can simulate participants' decisions in moral dilemma scenarios. We compare three conversational contexts -- Core-10 responses, the full interview dialogue, and a summarized persona representation. We find that adaptive interviewing functions less as a uniform accuracy booster and more as a selective grounding mechanism: follow-up-derived evidence is incorporated in around 40% of full-interview traces, and these follow-up-grounded predictions are more accurate than core-only grounded ones (45.5% vs. 39.3%). These findings highlight that richer persona context alone is insufficient: improvements arise only when models actually ground their decisions in user-specific evidence.

Ruoxi Su, Yuhan Liu, Jingyu Hu

Independent Researcher · University of Cambridge

LLM Grounding Human Behavior Simulation LLM Decision-Making

May 27, 2026cs.AI

CyberJurors: A Multi-Agent Simulation Task for E-Commerce Disputes Verdict

E-commerce platforms have begun recruiting crowdsourced jurors to adjudicate massive volumes of transaction disputes. Unlike formal legal judgment, E-commerce dispute verdicts require grounding pivotal clues from redundant, multi-round, multimodal evidence and making decisions under flexible platform-specific conventions. These characteristics render existing methods insufficient for this scenario. To bridge this gap, we introduce a pioneering task, E-commerce Dispute Verdicts (EDV), and present VerdictBench, a multimodal benchmark comprising 6,000 real-world cases designed to reflect crowdsourced jury decisions. Building upon this, we propose CyberJurors, a multi-agent framework to clarify the dispute logic and regulate the verdict process. At the individual level, Individual Verdict Chain-of-Thought decomposes the EDV task into four structured reasoning stages, enabling fine-grained clue perception and clarifying causal logic between pivotal clues and the dispute focus. At the collective level, Jury Consensus Verdict simulates multi-round discussion and voting among jurors, while incorporating verdict precedents to mitigate cognitive biases toward either disputant. Experiments on VerdictBench show that CyberJurors outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs, MLLMs, and court simulators, while achieving stronger alignment with real-world jury voting patterns. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/YanhuiS/CyberJurors and https://huggingface.co/datasets/piggi/VerdictBench.

Yanhui Sun, Wu Liu, Haifeng Ming +3

School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.

Multimodal Reasoning LLM Decision-Making E-Commerce Agent Benchmarks

May 27, 2026cs.CL

Framing Matters: Addressing Framing Sensitivity in Decision-Making through Behaviorally-Grounded Value Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making settings such as legal reasoning, where consistency under factually equivalent inputs is critical. However, we find that fact-preserved but differently framed inputs can significantly destabilize LLM decisions. To systematically investigate this problem, we introduce Fragile, a large-scale benchmark that isolates fact-preserving semantic framing across three controlled dimensions: value-tinted narration, temporal slice, and narrative vividness. Our experiments reveal a high susceptibility of LLMs to framing, with an average decision flip rate of 28.6%. We find that simple prior prompt-level and activation-level interventions not only fail to suppress framing sensitivity but actively amplify it. We therefore propose Valign, a representation-level method that explicitly targets these framing dimensions by anchoring decisions to a stable value prior, steering hidden states toward the model's value-consistent direction, and projecting out temporal-vividness-sensitive directions from the model's hidden states. Valign consistently reduces framing-induced decision flips, demonstrating that robust mitigation requires directly targeting the internal pathways in which framing operates.

Seojin Hwang, Minju Kim, Junhyuk Choi +2

Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea

LLM Alignment Framing Effects in Language Models LLM Decision-Making Causal Interventions in Language Models Language Model Robustness