# SAGE: Schema-Guided LLMs for Grant Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20829/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08491/) (2023)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Tasks, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01054/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Grant reviewers must apply detailed criteria to application forms, budgets, and supporting documents while producing assessments that colleagues can inspect. We present SAGE, Schema-Guided Aspect-Based Grant Evaluation, a system that translates a grant rubric into structured checks and links its judgements to evidence from the application package. We evaluate SAGE in two stages on 35 nonprofit grant applications. A post-factum comparison with 105 reviews from the original competition shows fair ordinal agreement (kappa = 0.29). The foundation then conducted a criterion-level re-review after inspecting SAGE, producing 202 assessments. In this assisted round, SAGE reached kappa = 0.58 and outperformed a one-prompt-per-criterion baseline (kappa = 0.33 on the common subset), with higher rank correlation and lower error. A claim-level audit further identifies confirmed, disputed, and unaddressed parts of the structured draft. SAGE operationalizes the review methodology by producing a detailed, evidence-linked, and auditable draft for expert correction.