Reasoning-Intensive Regression

AI researchers and practitioners increasingly apply large language models (LLMs) to what we call reasoning-intensive regression (RiR), i.e., deducing subtle numerical scores from text. Unlike standard language regression tasks, e.g., for sentiment or similarity, RiR often appears instead in ad-hoc problems such as rubric-based scoring, modeling dense rewards in complex environments, or domain-specific retrieval, where much deeper analysis of context is required while only limited task-specific training data and computation are available. We cast four realistic problems as RiR tasks to establish an initial benchmark, and use that to test our hypothesis that prompting frozen LLMs and finetuning Transformer encoders via gradient descent will both often struggle in RiR. We then propose MENTAT, a simple and lightweight method that combines batch-reflective prompt optimization with neural ensemble learning. MENTAT achieves up to 65% improvement over both baselines, though substantial room remains for future advances in RiR.