Benchmarking LLM Agents on Meta-Analysis Articles from Nature Portfolio D
AI benchmark · Biomedicine
- Publisher
- Paper Arxiv
- Domains
- Biomedicine
- Tier
- D why
- Snapshot
What is Benchmarking LLM Agents on Meta-Analysis Articles from Nature Portfolio?
Meta-analysis is a demanding form of evidence synthesis that combines literature retrieval, PI/ECO-guided study selection, and statistical aggregation. Its structured, verifiable workflow makes it an ideal substrate for evaluating systematic scientific reasoning, yet existing benchmarks lack ground truth across the full retrieval-screening-synthesis pipeline. We introduce MetaSyn, a dataset of 442 expert-curated meta-analyses from Nature Portfolio journals. Each entry pairs a research question with PI/ECO criteria, a retrieval corpus of 140k PubMed articles, verified positive studies, hard negatives that are topically similar but PI/ECO-ineligible, and complete search strategies and date bounds. Benchmarking twelve pipeline configurations (nine RAG variants and a protocol-driven agent) reveals a critical screening bottleneck: despite a retrieval ceiling of 90.9% recall at K=200, no system recovers more than 52.7% of ground-truth included literature. Current LLMs fail to reliably separate eligible studies from PI/ECO-failing distractors in pools of comparable topical relevance. Stage-attributed metrics capture where systems succeed and fail; a single end-to-end score does not.
Tier D
Long tail: little or no usage data yet.
How much stands behind a tier: usage, who backs it, a confirmed line from its own site or paper, and a clear read on X. High with three of the four, medium with two, low otherwise.
- 2 models scored
- no proper name (a paper title or description)
- in curated RL directories (1 pt)
How we got to tier D
- Adoption: 2 models scored; no proper name (a paper title or description). Tier D.
- Not yet read on X.
- In curated RL directories: 1 point, a floor of none.
- Not yet confirmed by a line from its own site or paper.
A clear view on X moves a tier one step up or down; most entries don't move. How tiers work.
Not on the map yet: no line from its own site or paper places it in a domain.
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