Papers for

automated report generators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Semantic query results vary across repeated runs even at zero temperature

Same Query, Different Answer: Run-to-Run Variance in Semantic Query Processing

Abstract: Semantic query engines ask a large language model (LLM) to judge individual rows, and benchmarks compare these engines on the quality of a few executions at temperature 0. We measure how much another execution changes. We re-execute the text and tabular workloads of SemBench, LRO-Bench, and UDA-Bench through their own harnesses, log every one of 1.2 million model calls, and reanalyze SemBench's published executions. At temperature 0, between 0.07% and 10.2% of rows change their operator output over five executions, depending on the model, and up to 24.0% on one task. Plans amplify these changes exponentially in the number of rows an answer exposes, as a possible-worlds model predicts: on UDA-Bench, a few percent of extracted values change, but about two thirds of the answers do. In SemBench's published results, 21% of text results change quality between executions, including on engines whose plans are deterministic. Several per-query system comparisons, and 16 of 28 tests of LRO-Bench's implementation recommendations, are not settled by the executions the benchmarks run. Changing rows are rows on which models disagree with each other; identical requests within one execution disagree as often as across executions; and one execution's decision margin or reasoning length predicts which rows change. Voting reduces the variance but does not remove it, and a calibrated cascade keeps its guarantee while the rows it returns change. We derive reporting rules for benchmarks and design rules for engines.

Fri 9 OctDatabasesArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Semantic query engines use large language models (LLMs) to decide whether rows in data meet certain conditions. This paper finds that even when these models are run multiple times with the same settings, their answers can differ for some rows—up to about 10% or more depending on the task. These small changes in individual rows can lead to much larger differences in the overall answers users get. The authors also explored ways to reduce this variability, like voting among multiple results, but it cannot be fully eliminated. They provide rules to help better report and design systems that handle this variability.
Open → 2610.13823v1