Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as AI analysts to process financial disclosures and support AI-assisted investment decisions. Yet such systems are usually evaluated by what they can retrieve, not whether retrieved information affects their judgments. We identify a retrieval-integration gap in long-context financial analysis. Holding focal-firm information fixed and varying only unrelated context from 2,000 to 128,000 tokens, we find that a risk disclosure's influence on investment judgments falls to the experimental noise floor even as direct retrieval remains accurate. The pattern replicates across model families and judgment tasks and in experiments removing real disclosures from actual 10-K filings. More capable models postpone but do not eliminate the gap. Causal memory interventions show that compressed summaries and source-text lookup jointly transmit disclosures into judgments. Workflow architecture determines whether this transmission succeeds: chunk-and-summarize pipelines evict relevant information, whereas a targeted, structured restatement adjacent to the decision restores its influence. AI analyst performance is therefore jointly determined by model capability and workflow architecture. Retrieval-based evaluations can certify systems whose investment judgments ignore information they demonstrably retrieved.
Omar Alsaiari, Nilufar Baghaei, Jason M. Lodge +3cs.AI
Feedback processes strongly influence student learning, yet their educational value depends on addressing two distinct challenges: providing high-quality, timely, and individualised feedback at scale, and supporting students to interpret, evaluate, and act on that feedback productively. Generative AI offers a credible means of addressing the provision challenge, but students' uptake of AI-generated feedback remains limited. We conducted a large-scale quasi-experimental sequential cohort study comparing three AI-mediated feedback workflows across 13,037 students and 51,296 student-authored resources. In Directed Feedback (n = 3,723), students received AI-generated feedback comments without structured support. In Self-Directed Feedback (n = 3,951), students could initiate optional AI-supported dialogue. In Enacted Feedback (n = 5,363), students were prompted to select feedback suggestions, evaluate their relevance, and engage in targeted AI-supported dialogue anchored to those selections. Enacted Feedback was associated with significantly higher uptake of AI-generated feedback, with an estimated probability of 26.2%, compared with 14.1% for Directed Feedback and 0.1% for Self-Directed Feedback. It was also associated with significantly higher self-assessment confidence and submitted-work quality than both comparison conditions. These findings suggest that the educational value of AI-generated feedback depends not only on the quality of feedback comments, but also on workflows that actively structure students' enactment of feedback literacy processes. The results have implications for the design of AI feedback systems that position learners as active participants in judgement, dialogue, and improvement rather than passive recipients of comments. Overall findings show that AI access alone is insufficient; purposeful workflow design is central to productive feedback use.