Yiming Lu
2025
DeFine: Decision-Making with Analogical Reasoning over Factor Profiles
Yebowen Hu
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Xiaoyang Wang
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Wenlin Yao
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Yiming Lu
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Daoan Zhang
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Hassan Foroosh
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Dong Yu
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Fei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
LLMs are ideal for decision-making thanks to their ability to reason over long contexts. However, challenges arise when processing speech transcripts that describe complex scenarios, as they are verbose and include repetition, hedging, and vagueness. E.g., during a company’s earnings call, an executive might project a positive revenue outlook to reassure investors, despite uncertainty regarding future earnings. It is crucial for LLMs to incorporate this uncertainty systematically when making decisions. In this paper, we introduce DeFine, a modular framework that constructs probabilistic factor profiles from complex scenarios. It then integrates these profiles with analogical reasoning, leveraging insights from similar past experiences to guide LLMs in making critical decisions in new situations. Our framework separates the tasks of quantifying uncertainty and incorporating it into LLM decision-making. This approach is particularly useful in areas such as consulting and financial deliberation, where making decisions under uncertainty is vital.
STRUX: An LLM for Decision-Making with Structured Explanations
Yiming Lu
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Yebowen Hu
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Hassan Foroosh
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Wei Jin
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Fei Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Countless decisions shape our lives, and it is crucial to understand the how and why behind them. In this paper, we introduce a new LLM decision-making framework called STRUX, which enhances LLM decision-making by providing structured explanations. These include favorable and adverse facts related to the decision, along with their respective strengths. STRUX begins by distilling lengthy information into a concise table of key facts. It then employs a series of self-reflection steps to determine which of these facts are pivotal, categorizing them as either favorable or adverse in relation to a specific decision. Lastly, we fine-tune an LLM to identify and prioritize these key facts to optimize decision-making. STRUX has been evaluated on the challenging task of forecasting stock investment decisions based on earnings call transcripts and demonstrated superior performance against strong baselines. It enhances decision transparency by allowing users to understand the impact of different factors, representing a meaningful step towards practical decision-making with LLMs.