Edward W Huang


2026

We introduce Agentic Economic Modeling (AEM), a framework that aligns synthetic LLM choices with small-sample human evidence for reliable econometric inference. AEM first generates task-conditioned synthetic choices via LLMs, then learns a bias-correction mapping from task features and raw LLM choices to human-aligned choices, upon which standard econometric estimators perform inference to recover demand elasticities and treatment effects. We validate AEM in two experiments. In a large scale conjoint study with millions of observations, using only 10% of the original data to fit the correction model lowers the error of the demand-parameter estimates, while uncorrected LLM choices even increase the errors. In a regional field experiment, a mixture model calibrated on 10% of geographic regions estimates an out-of-domain treatment effect of -65±10 bps, closely matching the full human experiment (-60±8 bps). Under time-wise extrapolation, training with only day-one human data yields -24 bps (95% CI: [-26, -22], p<1e-5), improving over the human-only day-one baseline (-17 bps, 95% CI: [-43, +9], p=0.2049). These results demonstrate AEM’s potential to improve RCT efficiency and establish a foundation method for LLM-based counterfactual generation.

2025

Recently, textual graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) has gained popularity for addressing hallucinations in large language models when answering domain-specific questions. Most existing studies assume that generated answers should comprehensively integrate all relevant information from the textual graph. However, this assumption may not always hold when certain information needs to be vetted or even blocked (e.g., due to safety concerns). In this paper, we target two sides of textual graph understanding and question answering: (1) normal question Answering (A-side): following standard practices, this task generates accurate responses using all relevant information within the textual graph; and (2) Blocked question answering (B-side): A new paradigm where the GraphRAG model must effectively infer and exclude specific relevant information in the generated response. To address these dual tasks, we propose TAONA, a novel GraphRAG model with two variants: (1) TAONA-A for A-side task, which incorporates a specialized GraphEncoder to learn graph prompting vectors; and (2) TAONA-B for B-side task, employing semi-supervised node classification to infer potential blocked graph nodes. Extensive experiments validate TAONA’s superior performance for both A-side and B-side tasks.