1Cademy - Debugging a Decomposition-Based LLM Workflow Using Recursive Sub-Problems and Contextual QA Pairs

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Debugging a Decomposition-Based LLM Workflow Using Recursive Sub-Problems and Contextual QA Pairs

You are the product owner for an internal LLM assistant that must answer employee questions about a new travel-and-expense (T&E) policy by reading a 40-page policy PDF and producing a final, auditable answer with citations. The team implemented a decomposition workflow: (1) generate a fixed list of sub-questions up front, (2) answer them one-by-one, and (3) synthesize a final response. In pilot, the assistant often gives a confident but wrong final answer when later sub-questions depend on definitions or exceptions discovered mid-way (e.g., a term like “client entertainment” is defined in an appendix and changes how earlier answers should be interpreted).

Write an evaluation and redesign proposal that explains: (a) how you would change sub-problem generation to be dynamic and allow new sub-questions to be created as intermediate answers reveal missing dependencies, (b) when and how you would use recursive decomposition for a sub-problem that is still too complex to answer directly (give one concrete example sub-problem and its recursive breakdown), and (c) how you would structure sequential sub-problem solving so that each step receives the original question plus prior question–answer pairs as context, including what you would include/exclude to reduce error propagation and context bloat. Your answer should make clear the causal links and tradeoffs among decomposition, recursion, and contextual QA carry-forward, and it should end with a brief description of how the final synthesis would use the accumulated sub-answers to produce an auditable response.

Updated 2026-02-06

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