arXiv subjects

Diane Tchuindjo

Publications and source records attributed to Diane Tchuindjo.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reasoning-Intensive Regression

AI researchers and practitioners increasingly apply large language models (LLMs) to what we call reasoning-intensive regression (RiR), i.e., deducing subtle numerical scores from text. Unlike standard language regression tasks such as sentiment or similarity analysis, RiR often appears instead in ad-hoc applications such as rubric-based scoring, modeling dense rewards in complex environments, or domain-specific retrieval, where much deeper analysis of context is required while only limited task-specific training data and computation are available. We cast four realistic problems as RiR tasks to establish an initial benchmark, and use that to test our hypothesis that prompting frozen LLMs and fine-tuning Transformer encoders via gradient descent will both often struggle in RiR. We then propose MENTAT, a simple and lightweight method that combines batch-reflective prompt optimization with neural ensemble learning. MENTAT achieves up to 65% improvement over both baselines, though substantial room remains for future advances.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

OBLIQ-Bench: Exposing Overlooked Bottlenecks in Modern Retrievers with Latent and Implicit Queries

Retrieval benchmarks are increasingly saturating, but we argue that efficient search is far from a solved problem. We identify a class of queries we call oblique, which seek documents that instantiate a latent pattern, like finding all tweets that express an implicit stance, chat logs that demonstrate a particular failure mode, or transcripts that match an abstract scenario. We study three mechanisms through which obliqueness may arise and introduce OBLIQ-Bench, a suite of five oblique search problems over real long-tail corpora. OBLIQ-Bench exposes an overlooked asymmetry between retrieval and verification, where reasoning LLMs reliably recognize latent relevance whenever relevant documents are surfaced, but even sophisticated retrieval pipelines fail to surface most relevant documents in the first place. We hope that OBLIQ-Bench will drive research into retrieval architectures that efficiently capture latent patterns and implicit signals in large corpora.

cs.IR↗