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arXiv · 2601.13075

METIS: Mentoring Engine for Thoughtful Inquiry & Solutions

Abhinav Rajeev Kumar·Dhruv Trehan·Paras Chopra
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Abstract

Many students lack access to expert research mentorship. We ask whether an AI mentor can move undergraduates from an idea to a paper. We build METIS, a tool-augmented, stage-aware assistant with literature search, curated guidelines, methodology checks, and memory. We evaluate METIS against GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 across six writing stages using LLM-as-a-judge pairwise preferences, student-persona rubrics, short multi-turn tutoring, and evidence/compliance checks. On 90 single-turn prompts, LLM judges preferred METIS to Claude Sonnet 4.5 in 71% and to GPT-5 in 54%. Student scores (clarity/actionability/constraint-fit; 90 prompts x 3 judges) are higher across stages. In multi-turn sessions (five scenarios/agent), METIS yields slightly higher final quality than GPT-5. Gains concentrate in document-grounded stages (D-F), consistent with stage-aware routing and groundings failure modes include premature tool routing, shallow grounding, and occasional stage misclassification.

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Abhinav Rajeev Kumar, Dhruv Trehan, Paras Chopra. 2026-01-19. METIS: Mentoring Engine for Thoughtful Inquiry & Solutions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13075

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