A Systematic Approach for Large Language Models Debugging
Large language models (LLMs) have become central to modern AI workflows, powering applications from open-ended text generation to complex agent-based reasoning. However, debugging these models remains a persistent challenge due to their opaque and probabilistic nature and the difficulty of diagnosing errors across diverse tasks and settings. This paper introduces a systematic approach for LLM debugging that treats models as observable systems, providing structured, model-agnostic methods from issue detection to model refinement. By unifying evaluation, interpretability, and error-analysis practices, our approach enables practitioners to iteratively diagnose model weaknesses, refine prompts and model parameters, and adapt data for fine-tuning or assessment, while remaining effective in contexts where standardized benchmarks and evaluation criteria are lacking. We argue that such a structured methodology not only accelerates troubleshooting but also fosters reproducibility, transparency, and scalability in the deployment of LLM-based systems.
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2604.23027 (cs) [Submitted on 24 Apr 2026] Title:A Systematic Approach for Large Language Models Debugging Authors:Basel Shbita, Anna Lisa Gentile, Bing Zhang, Sungeun An, Shailja Thakur, Shubhi Asthana, Yi Zhou, Saptha Surendran, Farhan Ahmed, Rohan Kulkarni, Yuya Jeremy Ong, Chad DeLuca, Hima Patel View a PDF of the paper titled A Systematic Approach for Large Language Models Debugging, by Basel Shbita and 12 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have become central to modern AI workflows, powering applications from open-ended text generation to complex agent-based reasoning. However, debugging these models remains a persistent challenge due to their opaque and probabilistic nature and the difficulty of diagnosing errors across diverse tasks and settings. This paper introduces a systematic approach for LLM debugging that treats models as observable systems, providing structured, model-agnostic methods from issue detection to model refinement. By unifying evaluation, interpretability, and error-analysis practices, our approach enables practitioners to iteratively diagnose model weaknesses, refine prompts and model parameters, and adapt data for fine-tuning or assessment, while remaining effective in contexts where standardized benchmarks and evaluation criteria are lacking. We argue that such a structured methodology not only accelerates troubleshooting but also fosters reproducibility, transparency, and scalability in the deployment of LLM-based systems. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.23027 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2604.23027v1 [cs.AI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.23027 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Basel Shbita [view email] [v1] Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:30:33 UTC (430 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled A Systematic Approach for Large Language Models Debugging, by Basel Shbita and 12 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators…
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