FLARE: An Error Analysis Framework for Diagnosing LLM Classification Failures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Large Language Models return "Inconclusive" in classification tasks, practitioners are left without insight into what went wrong.This diagnostic gap can delay medical decisions, undermine content moderation, and mislead downstream systems.We present FLARE (Failure Location and Reasoning Evaluation), a framework that transforms opaque failures into seven actionable categories.Applied to 5,400 election-misinformation classifications, FLARE reveals a surprising result: Few-Shot prompting-widely considered a best practice-produced 38× more failures than Zero-Shot, with 70.8% due to simple parsing issues.By exposing hidden failure modes, FLARE addresses critical misunderstandings in LLM deployment with implications across domains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".