Evaluation Research - Published April 28, 2026

PAEF: Atomic LLM Evaluation for Contract Compliance

A multi-contract, multi-model study of microagent decomposition, monolithic auditing, and token-level confidence analysis for regulated enterprise compliance.

LLM EvaluationContract Compliance MicroagentsToken-Level Calibration AI Governance
193Service contracts
7,913Labeled policy checks
3Models compared

Research question

Can atomic policy-level evaluation improve the auditability and diagnostic quality of LLM contract-compliance review compared with a single monolithic auditing pass?

The study evaluates microagent atomic policy checks against monolithic auditing across a labeled service-contract corpus and multiple compact models.

Study design

Corpus: 193 service contracts and 7,913 labeled policy checks.

Models: gpt-4.1-nano, gpt-4o-mini, and gpt-5-nano.

Comparison: microagent-based atomic checks versus a monolithic LLM auditor.

The published study reports that microagent evaluation outperformed monolithic auditing across all three evaluated models.

Token-level margin analysis

The method extracts a margin between non-compliance and compliance token likelihoods:

Delta = l(Non) - l(Com) and P(Non) = sigmoid(Delta)

This supports confidence analysis, disagreement review, salvage decisions, and audit-ready diagnostics rather than relying only on a final label.

Connection to model readiness

PAEF provides the evaluation pattern behind the LLM Evaluation Workbench: decompose governance-heavy tasks into atomic checks, compare models and evaluation strategies, track uncertainty, and create reviewable artifacts.

Publication

Parallelized Atomic Evaluation Framework (PAEF) for Contract Compliance: A Multi-Contract, Multi-Model Study with Token-Level Margin Analysis.

Champion, Cody; O'Kane, Alan; Prunty, Peter. Zenodo, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19848867.