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5 papers

#01Aug 6, 2026

cs.AI

Tracing the Heart: An Evidence-Linked Pipeline for Heart-Failure Feature Engineering

Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Michelle Hu, Dorisa Shehi and 10 more

Electronic health record (EHR) feature engineering is a major bottleneck in clinical research and AI, accounting for 39-45% of data scientists' workload. This is especially pronounced in heart failure, which affects an estimated 6.7 million U.S. adults and requires integrating fragmented EHR data with disease-specific, guideline-based clinical reasoning. Existing rule-based and large language model (LLM)-based approaches offer only partial automation with limited maintainability and evidence traceability. We developed the Nimblemind Multi-Agent System (nMAS), an evidence-linked, rubric-grounded pipeline for automated heart-failure feature engineering, and evaluated it on 500 dummy patient records from nine EHR source tables. nMAS generated 132 structured and 70 rubric-scored aggregated features, verified for structural integrity, rubric compliance, and provenance, and audited by a restricted LLM. Adding the aggregated features improved held-out AUROC from 0.895 to 0.963 for HFrEF and 0.870 to 0.910 for HFpEF phenotyping, and an independent LLM-based rubric assessment of evidence support and methodological soundness scored the features at 81.5% of maximum points. These results demonstrate the feasibility of automated, auditable feature engineering for complex cardiovascular EHR data, though evaluation was limited to a single-institution cohort and external validation is needed.

#02Aug 6, 2026

cs.CL

Benchmarking and Enhancing LLMs for Rule-Intensive Review of National Standard Documents

Tao Wang, Qihao Yang, Rongjiao Liang and 4 more

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support complex professional tasks, yet their capabilities in rule-intensive document review remain insufficiently evaluated. National standard documents, such as China GB/T standards, offer a representative testbed: they are lengthy, highly structured, and governed by explicit rules for scope, terminology, normative wording, and cross-section consistency. Existing benchmarks focus on domain knowledge and question answering, largely overlooking intrinsic quality review for professional documents. Such reviews rely heavily on human experts, making them costly and difficult to scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce GB/T-Bench, the first benchmark for the structured review of national standard documents. Its GB/T Review Taxonomy is a hierarchical schema covering document structure, scope alignment, normative modality, terminology consistency, and normative references, with 25 diagnosable error types. A controllable counterexample generation mechanism combines deterministic rules and constrained LLM rewriting to process 488 documents into 7,306 traceable review error instances for evaluation. We also develop a diagnosis-oriented evaluation protocol requiring exact matches on error location, review dimension, and error type, plus document-level coverage metrics. We further propose GB/T-Reviewer, a multi-agent framework that converts review knowledge into specialized skills and coordinates global inspection, targeted diagnosis, rule scanning, and result verification. Experiments with 14 mainstream LLMs reveal a substantial human-LLM gap: the strongest model achieves only 0.3280 CMCS versus 0.6640 for experts. GB/T-Reviewer raises the best CMCS to 0.5094, showing the value of structured skill coordination for rule-intensive document review. This work paves the way for trustworthy AI in standardization and other high-stakes document domains.

#03Aug 6, 2026

cs.GT

Resourced Authority A Mechanism-Design Model for Participatory Governance of Deployed AI Agents

Praphul Chandra, Sujit Gujar, Ganesh Ghalme

We give a formal mechanism design model for the continuous participatory governance of a deployed AI agent. The mechanism is built on the principle that governance should control an AI agent through resource allocation so as to make authorization self enforcing via compute budgets. The mechanism seeks to establish the Safe AI paradigm that compute is an effective governance lever. We situate our work as a compliance or commons overlay on a deployer. One governance period is an extensive form game in which verified human stakeholders arrive sequentially and contribute, on a provision or a rejection market, in a governance currency that is deliberately distinct from the agents compute. A funding aggregator turns raw contributions into breadth weighted effective supports - a two threshold gate with hysteresis converts net support into a binary authorization that, through a coupling map bounded by an exogenously certified safety ceiling, releases a metered compute budget - realized in hardware as a signed compute license so that the decision is self-enforcing. We characterize the class of agents the mechanism can govern and isolate manipulation of the governing electorate by the governed agent as the central open problem. We also introduce several challenges addressing manipulation of governing electorate by the governed agents.

#04Aug 6, 2026

cs.CL

The Bitter Lesson of Tool Calling

Ishan Patel, Sahil Sen, Elias Lumer and 1 more

Tool use transforms LLMs into agents that act beyond their training data, and for code-capable models, programmatic tool calling extends this further by replacing rigid JSON calls with scripts that chain and parallelize naturally. However, a systematic evaluation of tools as code on an established benchmark across current and prior model generations under real-world task conditions has not been conducted. In this work, we empirically compare programmatic tool calling (PTC) to native JSON tool calling across 14 language models on BFCL v4. In the programmatic tool calling paradigm, tools are exposed as typed Python stubs that the model invokes through code, with execution and results handled in a single agent turn. Programmatic tool calling matches or exceeds native JSON tool calling in 11 of 14 models on BFCL v4, with the GPT-5.6 family achieving a 10.6% improvement over the JSON tool calling baseline. Further, it matches or outperforms baseline in 13 of 14 models under parallel fan-out, and holds stable under context rot conditions where baseline degrades 2.3% on average. Our results demonstrate that programmatic tool calling is a viable and robust alternative to JSON tool calling, with performance tracking model capability across release generations.

#05Aug 6, 2026

cs.CL

NeSy-RAG: Neuro-Symbolic RAG for Explainable Question Answering

Jonas Gann, Michael Gertz

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves question answering by grounding large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge such as text corpora. However, its reasoning process remains largely opaque: intermediate reasoning steps are difficult to verify and cannot be reliably attributed to specific evidence. Moreover, missing user-specific context is rarely detected systematically, often leading to incomplete or incorrect output. We propose NeSy-RAG, a modular neuro-symbolic RAG framework that synthesizes attributable Prolog modules from retrieved text chunks. For each chunk, the system generates semantically meaningful predicates that encode Boolean claims, which may depend on user facts. Using joint natural language-code embeddings, predicates are retrieved and composed into Prolog queries. To address incomplete user context, we introduce a symbolic knowledge-gap detection mechanism that identifies missing user facts whose truth values affect the query outcome and automatically triggers follow-up interactions. Executing the resulting Prolog queries yields deterministic answers together with transparent execution traces that link each reasoning step to its originating source. On the ShARC benchmark, without domain-specific training, NeSy-RAG achieves 61.1% accuracy, outperforming a same-model RAG baseline that achieves 42.8% accuracy.