From Verification Burden to Trusted Collaboration: Design Goals for LLM-Assisted Literature Reviews

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in academic writing practices. Although numerous studies have explored how researchers employ these tools for scientific writing, their concrete implementation, limitations, and design challenges within the literature review process remain underexplored. In this paper, we report a user study with researchers across multiple disciplines to characterize current practices, benefits, and \textit{pain points} in using LLMs to investigate related work. We identified three recurring gaps: (i) lack of trust in outputs, (ii) persistent verification burden, and (iii) requiring multiple tools. This motivates our proposal of six design goals and a high-level framework that operationalizes them through improved related papers visualization, verification at every step, and human-feedback alignment with generation-guided explanations. Overall, by grounding our work in the practical, day-to-day needs of researchers, we designed a framework that addresses these limitations and models real-world LLM-assisted writing, advancing trust through verifiable actions and fostering practical collaboration between researchers and AI systems.

Relevance-aware Algorithmic Recourse

As machine learning continues to gain prominence, transparency and explainability are increasingly critical. Without an understanding of these models, they can replicate and worsen human bias, adversely affecting marginalized communities. Algorithmic recourse emerges as a tool for clarifying decisions made by predictive models, providing actionable insights to alter outcomes. They answer, 'What do I have to change?' to achieve the desired result. Despite their importance, current algorithmic recourse methods treat all domain values equally, which is unrealistic in real-world settings. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Relevance-Aware Algorithmic Recourse (RAAR), that leverages the concept of relevance in applying algorithmic recourse to regression tasks. We conducted multiple experiments on 15 datasets to outline how relevance influences recourses. Results show that relevance contributes algorithmic recourses comparable to well-known baselines, with greater efficiency and lower relative costs.