LLM作为调查员:基于证据优先的鲁棒交互式问题诊断方法 / LLM-as-an-Investigator: Evidence-First Reasoning for Robust Interactive Problem Diagnosis
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出一种让大语言模型像侦探一样先收集证据再下结论的方法,通过主动提问和动态评估假设,有效避免模型被用户不完整的描述或错误暗示误导,从而更准确地诊断技术问题。
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive assistants for technical problem solving. However, when users provide incomplete descriptions or plausible but unverified explanations, LLMs may prematurely align with these assumptions and propose solutions before collecting sufficient evidence. We refer to this behavior as user-driven sycophancy: the tendency of an LLM to reinforce a user-provided hypothesis instead of testing alternative explanations. This paper introduces LLM-as-an-Investigator, an evidence-first agentic AI methodology for robust problem diagnosis. The approach is implemented through a Solution Investigator Agent, which estimates the ambiguity of an initial problem description, generates candidate hypotheses, asks targeted clarification questions, and updates hypothesis probabilities after each answer. Rather than producing an immediate response, the agent continues the investigation until the evidence makes one candidate explanation stronger than the alternatives. To evaluate the approach, we build a benchmark from solved technical forum threads in mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic domains. We use a three-agent evaluation pipeline in which a Problem-Solution Extractor Agent converts solved threads into structured cases, a Ground-Truth Evaluator Agent simulates the user while hiding the known solution, and the tested assistant attempts to recover the solution through dialogue. The experiments compare standard assistants, reasoning-oriented LLMs, and the proposed investigator-based model across LLM backbones. In addition to diagnostic accuracy, we analyze how standard assistants follow misleading user hypotheses in diagnostic cases. The results show that the proposed approach identifies the problem more accurately than direct prompting and reasoning-only baselines, while its evidence-first protocol helps reduce user-induced conversational bias.
LLM作为调查员:基于证据优先的鲁棒交互式问题诊断方法 / LLM-as-an-Investigator: Evidence-First Reasoning for Robust Interactive Problem Diagnosis
本文提出一种让大语言模型像侦探一样先收集证据再下结论的方法,通过主动提问和动态评估假设,有效避免模型被用户不完整的描述或错误暗示误导,从而更准确地诊断技术问题。
源自 arXiv: 2606.13220