Negar Arabzadeh
Author directory2026
RAG over Thinking Traces Can Improve Reasoning Tasks
Negar Arabzadeh | Wenjie Ma | Sewon Min | Matei Zaharia
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Negar Arabzadeh | Wenjie Ma | Sewon Min | Matei Zaharia
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective for knowledge-intensive tasks, but is widely believed to offer limited benefit for reasoning-intensive problems such as math and code generation. We challenge this assumption by showing that the limitation lies not in RAG itself, but in the choice of corpus. Instead of retrieving documents, we propose retrieving thinking traces, i.e., intermediate thinking trajectories generated during problem solving attempts. We show that thinking traces are already a strong retrieval source, and further introduce , an offline method that transforms them into structured, retrieval-friendly representations, to improve usability. Using these traces as a corpus, a simple retrieve-then-generate pipeline consistently improves reasoning performance across strong models and benchmarks such as AIME 2025–2026, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond, outperforming both non-RAG baselines and retrieval over standard web corpora. For instance, on AIME 2025-2026, RAG with traces generated by Gemini-2-thinking achieves relative gains of +56.3%, +8.6%, and +7.6% for Gemini-2.5-Flash, GPT-OSS-120B, and GPT-5, respectively, even though these are more recent models. Overall, our results suggest that thinking traces are an effective retrieval corpus for reasoning tasks, and transforming them into structured, compact, or diagnostic representations unlocks even stronger gains.
Peerify: Benchmarking Peer-Review Claim Verification
Alireza Daghighfarsoodeh | Sajad Ebrahimi | Ali Ghorbanpour | Soroush Sadeghian | Radin Cheraghi | Negar Arabzadeh | Ebrahim Bagheri
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Alireza Daghighfarsoodeh | Sajad Ebrahimi | Ali Ghorbanpour | Soroush Sadeghian | Radin Cheraghi | Negar Arabzadeh | Ebrahim Bagheri
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Peer review plays a central role in scholarly publishing, yet verifying whether reviewer claims are supported by manuscript evidence remains a largely manual and time-consuming process. We present Peerify, a pipeline for manuscript-grounded verification of peer-review claims. Given a manuscript and a review comment, Peerify pipeline decomposes reviews into atomic claims, retrieves relevant manuscript evidence, and determines whether each claim is supported by the paper. To support the development and evaluation of the pipeline, we construct a benchmark of 800 claims derived from authentic peer-review interactions collected from NeurIPS 2024 and ICLR 2024, including a 300-claim hand-labeled subset used to audit the automated supervision. We evaluate state-of-the-art language models and retrieval strategies within Peerify pipeline, together with entailment baselines. Our results demonstrate the importance of retrieval-centered verification and claim decomposition, while highlighting the challenges posed by ambiguous and interpretive reviewer claims. Automated labels agree with human consensus on 90.3% of audited claims (đťś… = 0.87), while off-the-shelf entailment models stay below 0.24 macro-F1.
2024
Assessing and Verifying Task Utility in LLM-Powered Applications
Negar Arabzadeh | Siqing Huo | Nikhil Mehta | Qingyun Wu | Chi Wang | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Charles L. A. Clarke | Julia Kiseleva
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Negar Arabzadeh | Siqing Huo | Nikhil Mehta | Qingyun Wu | Chi Wang | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Charles L. A. Clarke | Julia Kiseleva
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a surge in applications that facilitate collaboration among multiple agents, assisting humans in their daily tasks. However, a significant gap remains in assessing to what extent LLM-powered applications genuinely enhance user experience and task execution efficiency. This highlights the need to verify utility of LLM-powered applications, particularly by ensuring alignment between the application’s functionality and end-user needs. We introduce AgentEval, a novel framework designed to simplify the utility verification process by automatically proposing a set of criteria tailored to the unique purpose of any given application. This allows for a comprehensive assessment, quantifying the utility of an application against the suggested criteria. We present a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness and robustness of AgentEval for two open source datasets including Math Problem solving and ALFWorld House-hold related tasks. For reproducibility purposes, we make the data, code and all the logs publicly available at https://github.com/Narabzad/AgentEval
Fréchet Distance for Offline Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems with Sparse Labels
Negar Arabzadeh | Charles Clarke
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Negar Arabzadeh | Charles Clarke
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The rapid advancement of natural language processing, information retrieval (IR), computer vision, and other technologies has presented significant challenges in evaluating the performance of these systems. One of the main challenges is the scarcity of human-labeled data, which hinders the fair and accurate assessment of these systems. In this work, we specifically focus on evaluating IR systems with sparse labels, borrowing from recent research on evaluating computer vision tasks.taking inspiration from the success of using Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) in assessing text-to-image generation systems. We propose leveraging the Fréchet Distance to measure the distance between the distributions of relevant judged items and retrieved results. Our experimental results on MS MARCO V1 dataset and TREC Deep Learning Tracks query sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the Fréchet Distance as a metric for evaluating IR systems, particularly in settings where a few labels are available.This approach contributes to the advancement of evaluation methodologies in real-world scenarios such as the assessment of generative IR systems.
2023
PREME: Preference-based Meeting Exploration through an Interactive Questionnaire
Negar Arabzadeh | Ali Ahmadvand | Julia Kiseleva | Yang Liu | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Ming Zhong | Milad Shokouhi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Negar Arabzadeh | Ali Ahmadvand | Julia Kiseleva | Yang Liu | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah | Ming Zhong | Milad Shokouhi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
The recent increase in the volume of online meetings necessitates automated tools for organizing the material, especially when an attendee has missed the discussion and needs assistance in quickly exploring it. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for generating interactive questionnaires for preference-based meeting exploration. As a result, users are supplied with a list of suggested questions reflecting their preferences. Since the task is new, we introduce an automatic evaluation strategy by measuring how much the generated questions via questionnaire are answerable to ensure factual correctness and covers the source meeting for the depth of possible exploration.