REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 36 references
Do not be greedy, Think Twice: Sampling and Selection for Document-level Information Extraction
T0 review · 3 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-03 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read For document-level information extraction, sampling and selection consistently outperform greedy decoding and set a new state of the art.
desk verdict A genuine first TTS-for-DocIE adaptation with a clean unsupervised selector, but every sampled result rests on one seed and the 'consistent' claim is contradicted by the paper's own non-reasoning tables. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central mechanism is 'sample-then-select': the generator produces N structured template candidates under constrained decoding (with reasoning traces for reasoning models), and a selector chooses one. Two selectors are introduced: F1 Voting, which scores each candidate by its average pairwise F1 against the other N-1 candidates, exploiting agreement as a quality signal; and a supervised reward model trained with a Bradley-Terry margin loss on silver preference pairs (chosen vs rejected templates ranked by F1 against gold). A rejection-sampling loop supplies the silver training data: generate N candidate reasoning-template pairs, keep the top K by F1 against gold, fine-tune the model, and
What would settle it
Run the same sampling-and-selection pipeline on a held-out document-level IE dataset with non-overlapping template structures, and measure (1) the oracle gap between greedy and best-of-64, and (2) whether F1 Voting or the reward selector recovers any of it. If the oracle gap is near zero, sampling has nothing to exploit; if the selectors pick no better than a random candidate, the selection mechanism is not finding better templates.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that the stochastic variability of LLM outputs is an asset, not a nuisance: for a fixed document, sampling 64 candidate templates and selecting one via F1 Voting or a reward model consistently beats the single greedy output, often by several F1 points, and more so for reasoning models. The paper further claims that a reward model trained on automatically generated silver preferences—built from the same rejection-sampling loop—is the strongest selector, surpassing the unsupervised methods and establishing state-of-the-art results in zero-shot, supervised, and cross-lingual settings. The key empirical observation is the widening oracle gap: the best of 64 samples scores fa
Load-bearing premise
The supervised gains rest on the assumption that the silver reasoning traces—generated by the model itself and kept only when the paired template scores well against the gold template—teach genuine document reasoning rather than template formatting or dataset artifacts; the paper reports that only 68-71% of training instances passed a 'gold-quality' filter, with no human evaluation of the traces.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Greedy decoding under-reports LLM capability on document-level IE; sampling and selection should become the default evaluation mode.
- Unsupervised F1 Voting improves over greedy in zero-shot settings and beats majority voting, especially for complex, long-tail templates.
- The supervised reward selector is the strongest variant, beating all unsupervised selectors and previously published systems on the English benchmark.
- Training the reasoning LLM on silver traces produced by rejection sampling transfers across languages, outperforming reference systems trained on target-language data in several languages.
- Reasoning-oriented models benefit more from sampling than non-reasoning models, making them the preferred backbone for document-level IE.
Reading between the lines
- The wide gap between the selected output and the oracle best-of-N suggests the bottleneck has shifted from generation to selection; better selectors may yield further gains without improving the generator at all.
- F1 Voting's success implies that for structured outputs, agreement under a task-specific metric is a usable quality signal; the same idea could transfer to other structured prediction tasks where exact-match majority voting fails.
- If the silver-traces training works as claimed, it offers a general recipe for fine-tuning reasoning models on tasks without gold chain-of-thought: generate, filter by task score, and iterate. The reported trace-quality ceiling (roughly two-thirds of traces judged 'gold-quality') is a clear target for better filters or reinforcement learning.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes THINKTWICE, an inference-time sampling-and-selection framework for document-level information extraction (DocIE). For each input document, the LLM generates N=64 candidate templates under constrained decoding, and a selector chooses the final template. Two selectors are introduced: an unsupervised F1 Voting method that scores each candidate by its average F1 similarity to the other candidates, and a supervised reward model trained on silver preference data. The supervised pipeline includes a rejection-sampling procedure that generates silver reasoning traces, filters them by F1 against gold templates, and fine-tunes both the reasoning LLM and the reward model. Experiments on MUC-4, MultiMUC, and BETTER Granular report that THINKTWICE consistently outperforms greedy decoding, especially for reasoning models, and achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot, supervised, and cross-lingual settings. The paper also makes its code publicly available.
Significance. If the empirical claims hold, the paper makes a useful contribution to LLM-based DocIE: it challenges the default of greedy decoding and adapts test-time scaling ideas to structured extraction. The framework is simple, well-motivated, and the open-source code is a strength. The main evidence, however, is currently a set of single-seed point estimates with no uncertainty quantification; several improvements are modest, and the quality of the silver reasoning traces is not independently verified. These gaps prevent the paper from fully supporting the 'consistently outperforms' claim and the specific attribution of gains to reasoning quality.
major comments (3)
- [Section 5.2, Table 1, Appendix D] All reported results are single-seed point estimates. Appendix D states that whenever sampling is used, 'we fix the random seed to 42.' Tables 1, 5, 6, and 7 report no standard deviations, confidence intervals, or significance tests. The observed gains are often modest — e.g., MUC Llama R1 F1 Voting 21.23 vs greedy 18.68; MultiMUC average 13.22 vs 11.46 — so the 'consistently outperforms' claim in the Abstract and Section 5.2 is not yet established. Please run the full pipeline over multiple seeds (e.g., 5) and report means ± std, and perform a paired significance test (e.g., bootstrap or Wilcoxon over documents) for the greedy-vs-selected comparison.
- [Section 5.3] The supervised fine-tuning pipeline relies on model-generated silver reasoning traces filtered by F1 against gold templates. The paper reports that only 67.77% (Llama R1) and 71.46% (Qwen 3) of training instances received traces judged 'gold-quality', but no human evaluation or direct analysis of these traces is provided. If the accepted traces predominantly teach the model to follow the JSON template or exploit dataset surface patterns rather than to reason over document evidence, the fine-tuning gains attributed to ThinkTwice may not reflect improved reasoning. Please provide either a human evaluation of a sample of accepted and rejected traces, or an ablation that trains on the same silver data without the reasoning-trace component, to isolate the contribution of the traces.
- [Section 3.4 and Section 4.3] The F1 Voting selector uses a 'simplified F1 scorer' for the BETTER dataset, while the final evaluation uses the official BETTER scorer. The manuscript does not quantify how the simplified scorer differs from the official scorer, nor whether the simplified scorer is a good proxy for the official metric. Since selection and evaluation use different scoring functions, the candidate selected by the simplified F1 may not be optimal under the official metric, which could affect the zero-shot BETTER results in Table 1 and Table 5. Please either use the official scorer in selection or report the correlation between simplified F1 and official scores on a development set.
minor comments (5)
- [Section 5.2] Typo: 'we sue' should be 'we use'.
- [Section 5.3] Typo: 'calib' should be 'calibrate'.
- [Table 3] The table uses commas as decimal separators (0,7) while the text uses periods; please make the style consistent.
- [Figure 2 caption] The symbol '1⃝' is unclear; use a standard circled number or plain text.
- [Table 1 header] The column header 'BETTERA VG' appears to be a formatting artifact; should read 'BETTER Avg'.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: the selectors are either unsupervised or trained on external gold-derived labels, and the only self-citation is not load-bearing.
full rationale
This is an empirical systems paper rather than a derivation, so the main circularity patterns do not apply. The unsupervised F1 Voting selector (Eq. 1) scores candidates by their average similarity to other sampled candidates only; it never uses gold annotations, so selecting with it and then scoring with the evaluation metric is not a reduction to the input. The supervised reward model (Eqs. 2-4) is trained on pairwise preferences induced by F1 against gold templates; this is ordinary supervised learning with external labels, not a fitted parameter being renamed as a prediction. The rejection-sampling silver-data loop (Section 3.3) filters the model's own outputs by F1 against gold on the training set and then fine-tunes on the survivors; this is expert iteration / self-training with gold supervision, and evaluation is on held-out test annotations, so the gains are not forced by construction. The paper reports oracle upper bounds explicitly and acknowledges that only 67.77% and 71.46% of training instances received gold-quality traces, which is a stated limitation rather than a hidden circular step. The one overlapping-author citation, [Sainz et al., 2024] for guideline-aware prompting, is a component choice shared by all compared configurations and is not load-bearing for the central sampling-vs-greedy claim. The single-seed evaluation concern raised by the skeptic is a statistical-evidence / correctness risk, not a circularity. No quoted equation reduces to its own input, so the honest finding is no significant circularity.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (6)
- sample_count_N =
64
- top_K_selected =
8 per iteration; final 4 (Qwen3) / 1 (Llama R1)
- reward_margin_scaling_lambda =
3
- inference_sampling_hyperparameters =
temperature 0.6-0.7, top_p 0.8-1.0, top_k -1/20 per model
- rejection_sampling_iterations =
8 (Llama R1), 14 (Qwen3)
- fine_tuning_hyperparameters =
LR 5e-5 (LLM) / 2e-5 (reward); epochs 5/4; batch 128/512
assumptions (5)
- domain assumption CEAF-RME/F1 is a valid proxy for template extraction quality and is used to rank silver candidates against gold annotations.
- domain assumption The simplified F1 scorer used by F1 Voting approximates the official BETTER/MUC scorers.
- ad hoc to paper Model-generated silver reasoning traces filtered by gold F1 are adequate training targets for a reasoning LLM.
- standard math Bradley-Terry preference model with margin loss is a valid way to train the reward selector.
- domain assumption Constrained JSON-schema decoding reliably produces parseable templates from all sampled candidates.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Do not be greedy, Think Twice: Sampling and Selection for Document-level Information Extraction." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/NNJ2GTTU
@misc{pith2026260118395,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Do not be greedy, Think Twice: Sampling and Selection for Document-level Information Extraction},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/NNJ2GTTU}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2601.18395}
}
read the original abstract
Document-level Information Extraction (DocIE) aims to produce an output template with the entities, relations, and events of interest occurring in the given document. Standard practices include prompting decoder-only LLMs using greedy decoding to avoid output variability. Rather than treating this variability as a limitation, we show that sampling can produce substantially better solutions than greedy decoding, especially when using reasoning models. We thus propose ThinkTwice, a sampling and selection framework in which the LLM generates multiple candidate templates for a given document, and a selection module chooses the most suitable one. We introduce both an unsupervised method that exploits agreement across generated outputs, and a supervised selection method using reward models trained on labeled DocIE data. To address the scarcity of golden reasoning trajectories for DocIE, we propose a rejection-sampling-based method to generate silver training data that pairs output templates with reasoning traces. Our experiments show the validity of unsupervised and supervised ThinkTwice, consistently outperforming greedy baselines and the supervised state-of-the-art.
Figures
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Reference graph
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Reviewed August 3, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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