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Main Authors: Demirel, Ilker, Shi, Lawrence, Hussain, Zeshan, Sontag, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11679
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author Demirel, Ilker
Shi, Lawrence
Hussain, Zeshan
Sontag, David
author_facet Demirel, Ilker
Shi, Lawrence
Hussain, Zeshan
Sontag, David
contents As real-world datasets become more complex and heterogeneous, supervised learning is often bottlenecked by input representation design. Modeling multimodal data, such as time-series, free text, and structured records, often requires non-trivial domain expertise. We propose an agentic pipeline to streamline this process. First, an LLM analyzes a small but diverse subset of text-serialized input examples in-context to synthesize a global rubric, which acts as a programmatic specification for extracting and organizing evidence. This rubric is then used to transform naive text-serializations of inputs into a more standardized format for downstream models. We also describe local rubrics, which are task-conditioned interpretive summaries generated by an LLM. Across 15 clinical tasks from the EHRSHOT benchmark, our rubric approaches significantly outperform count-feature models, naive LLM baselines, and a clinical foundation model pretrained on orders of magnitude more data. Beyond performance, rubrics offer operational advantages such as being easy to audit, cost-effectiveness at scale, and facilitating tabular representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11679
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLMs can construct powerful representations and streamline sample-efficient supervised learning
Demirel, Ilker
Shi, Lawrence
Hussain, Zeshan
Sontag, David
Artificial Intelligence
As real-world datasets become more complex and heterogeneous, supervised learning is often bottlenecked by input representation design. Modeling multimodal data, such as time-series, free text, and structured records, often requires non-trivial domain expertise. We propose an agentic pipeline to streamline this process. First, an LLM analyzes a small but diverse subset of text-serialized input examples in-context to synthesize a global rubric, which acts as a programmatic specification for extracting and organizing evidence. This rubric is then used to transform naive text-serializations of inputs into a more standardized format for downstream models. We also describe local rubrics, which are task-conditioned interpretive summaries generated by an LLM. Across 15 clinical tasks from the EHRSHOT benchmark, our rubric approaches significantly outperform count-feature models, naive LLM baselines, and a clinical foundation model pretrained on orders of magnitude more data. Beyond performance, rubrics offer operational advantages such as being easy to audit, cost-effectiveness at scale, and facilitating tabular representations.
title LLMs can construct powerful representations and streamline sample-efficient supervised learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11679