Whose Name Comes Up? Benchmarking and Intervention-Based Auditing of LLM-Based Scholar Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Espin-Noboa, Lisette, Mendez, Gonzalo Gabriel
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Espin-Noboa, Lisette
Mendez, Gonzalo Gabriel
author_facet Espin-Noboa, Lisette
Mendez, Gonzalo Gabriel
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for academic expert recommendation. Existing audits typically evaluate model outputs in isolation, largely ignoring end-user inference-time interventions. As a result, it remains unclear whether failures such as refusals, hallucinations, and uneven coverage stem from model choice or deployment decisions. We introduce LLMScholarBench, a benchmark for auditing LLM-based scholar recommendation that jointly evaluates model infrastructure and end-user interventions across multiple tasks. LLMScholarBench measures both technical quality and social representation using nine metrics. We instantiate the benchmark in physics expert recommendation and audit 22 LLMs under temperature variation, representation-constrained prompting, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via web search. Our results show that end-user interventions do not yield uniform improvements but instead redistribute error across dimensions. Higher temperature degrades validity, consistency, and factuality. Representation-constrained prompting improves diversity at the expense of factuality, while RAG primarily improves technical quality while reducing diversity and parity. Overall, end-user interventions reshape trade-offs rather than providing a general fix. We release code and data that can be adapted to other disciplines by replacing domain-specific ground truth and metrics.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08873
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Whose Name Comes Up? Benchmarking and Intervention-Based Auditing of LLM-Based Scholar Recommendation
Espin-Noboa, Lisette
Mendez, Gonzalo Gabriel
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for academic expert recommendation. Existing audits typically evaluate model outputs in isolation, largely ignoring end-user inference-time interventions. As a result, it remains unclear whether failures such as refusals, hallucinations, and uneven coverage stem from model choice or deployment decisions. We introduce LLMScholarBench, a benchmark for auditing LLM-based scholar recommendation that jointly evaluates model infrastructure and end-user interventions across multiple tasks. LLMScholarBench measures both technical quality and social representation using nine metrics. We instantiate the benchmark in physics expert recommendation and audit 22 LLMs under temperature variation, representation-constrained prompting, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via web search. Our results show that end-user interventions do not yield uniform improvements but instead redistribute error across dimensions. Higher temperature degrades validity, consistency, and factuality. Representation-constrained prompting improves diversity at the expense of factuality, while RAG primarily improves technical quality while reducing diversity and parity. Overall, end-user interventions reshape trade-offs rather than providing a general fix. We release code and data that can be adapted to other disciplines by replacing domain-specific ground truth and metrics.
title Whose Name Comes Up? Benchmarking and Intervention-Based Auditing of LLM-Based Scholar Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08873