Pattaraphon Kenny Wongchamcharoen

arXiv2026

CentaurBench: Benchmarking LLM Capabilities on Augmenting vs. Automating Real-World Work Tasks

Most LLM benchmarks rank models on their ability to automate work tasks. In practice, however, models are often used to assist other (human or LLM) agents. The question that drives model selection is therefore not only which model produces the best output, but which model most improves the work of another (weaker) agent. We introduce a unified framework that evaluates the capability of models to automate and augment another agent's performance. Across seven economically grounded real-world tasks, an assistant model writes assistance text for a standardized lower-capacity worker model, which produces the deliverable. In automation mode, the assistant produces the output directly. Outputs are scored through blind pairwise comparisons by an LLM judge panel with task-specific rubrics, replicated across ten runs. Rankings across the two regimes are only modestly correlated, and the automation winner loses augmentation on five of seven tasks. Assistance is not reliably positive. The unaided worker outranks every assisted condition on three tasks, and only one model's guidance beats no guidance on average. These results suggest that automation ability is an incomplete proxy for assistance quality, motivating benchmarks that evaluate models according to the roles they play in human-AI and multi-agent systems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Do Large Language Models (LLMs) Understand Chronology?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in finance and economics, where prompt-based attempts against look-ahead bias implicitly assume that models understand chronology. We test this fundamental question with a series of chronological ordering tasks with increasing complexities over facts the model already knows from pre-training. Our tasks cover (1) chronological ordering, (2) conditional sorting (filter, then order), and (3) anachronism detection. We evaluate GPT-4.1, Claude-3.7 Sonnet, with and without Extended Thinking (ET), and GPT-5 across multiple reasoning-effort settings. Across models, Exact match rate drops sharply as sequences lengthen even while rank correlations stay high as LLMs largely preserve local order but struggle to maintain a single globally consistent timeline. In conditional sorting, most failures stem from the filtering step rather than the ordering step, but GPT-5 and Claude-3.7 Sonnet with Extended Thinking outshine normal models significantly. Lastly, anachronism detection is found to be the easiest task for the LLMs but performance still declines with increasingly overlapping timelines or entities. Overall, our main contribution is showing that allocating explicit reasoning budget helps with chronological ordering with GPT-5 at medium/high reasoning effort achieving flawless ordering at all lengths and perfect conditional sorting (both self-filtered and given-subset), whereas low/minimal effort degrades with longer lists, mirroring earlier models. Our findings delineate limits of current LLMs on chronological tasks, providing insights into task complexity, and demonstrate scenarios in which reasoning helps. These patterns are important for the real-time application of LLMs in finance. We release all code and evaluation templates to support full reproducibility.

cs.AI↗