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Making LLMs Reliable When It Matters Most: A Five-Layer Architecture for High-Stakes Decisions

arXiv:2511.07669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current large language models (LLMs) excel in verifiable domains where outputs can be checked before action but prove less reliable for high-stakes strategic decisions with uncertain outcomes. This gap, driven by mutually reinforcing cognitive biases in both humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, threatens the defensibility of valuations and sustainability of investments in the sector. This report describes a framework emerging from systematic qualitative assessment across 7 frontier-grade LLMs and 3 market-facing venture vignettes under time pressure. Detailed prompting specifying decision partnership and explicitly instructing avoidance of sycophancy, confabulation, solution drift, and nihilism achieved initial partnership state but failed to maintain it under operational pressure. Sustaining protective partnership state required an emergent 7-stage calibration sequence, built upon a 4-stage initialization process, within a 5-layer protection architecture enabling bias self-monitoring, human-AI adversarial challenge, partnership state verification, performance degradation detection, and stakeholder protection. Three discoveries resulted: partnership state is achievable through ordered calibration but requires emergent maintenance protocols; reliability degrades when architectural drift and context exhaustion align; and dissolution discipline prevents costly pursuit of fundamentally wrong directions. Cross-model validation revealed systematic performance differences across LLM architectures. This approach demonstrates that human-AI teams can achieve cognitive partnership capable of preventing avoidable regret in high-stakes decisions, addressing return-on-investment expectations that depend on AI systems supporting consequential decision-making without introducing preventable cognitive traps when verification arrives too late.

Clinical Uncertainty Impacts Machine Learning Evaluations

arXiv:2509.22242v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical dataset labels are rarely certain as annotators disagree and confidence is not uniform across cases. Typical aggregation procedures, such as majority voting, obscure this variability. In simple experiments on medical imaging benchmarks, accounting for the confidence in binary labels significantly impacts model rankings. We therefore argue that machine-learning evaluations should explicitly account for annotation uncertainty using probabilistic metrics that directly operate on distributions. These metrics can be applied independently of the annotations' generating process, whether modeled by simple counting, subjective confidence ratings, or probabilistic response models. They are also computationally lightweight, as closed-form expressions have linear-time implementations once examples are sorted by model score. We thus urge the community to release raw annotations for datasets and to adopt uncertainty-aware evaluation so that performance estimates may better reflect clinical data.
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