# Can Decision Models Understand Stance? Evaluating Jev Against General-Purpose LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11901 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11901/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

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

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Stance in Replies and Quotes (SRQ): A New Dataset For Learning Stance in Twitter Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00691/) (2020)
- [Jev for Scientific Decisions: Evaluating Semantic Choices and Their Consequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24965/) (2026)
- [Can Jev Judge Radiology Reports? Evaluating a System One Model for Clinical Factuality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27607/) (2026)
- [Same Scores, Different Decisions: Evaluating JEV and Language Models for Legal Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27678/) (2026)
- [Decision Models vs. LLMs as Rubric Judges: Cheaper, Faster, and Wrong in the Same Places](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29769/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Stance detection requires identifying an author's attitude toward a given target, sometimes based on conversational context. Jev, a specialized decision model designed for structured decision-making, offers an alternative to general-purpose large language models (LLMs). In this work, we evaluate Jev on two stance detection datasets, VAST (English texts) and ZS-CSD (Chinese conversations), comparing it with four general-purpose LLMs and two fine-tuned models. Results show that Jev achieves competitive performance on VAST, matching GPT-5.6 and outperforming the other general-purpose LLMs. However, it falls behind stronger LLMs on ZS-CSD, particularly in distinguishing favor from against. Further analysis suggests that this limitation may be related to understanding reply relationships and stance direction rather than conversation length alone. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of Jev for stance detection.