TransLaTeX: Exposing the Last-Mile Execution Gap in LLM-Agent for Scientific Formatting

AbstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in tasks such as survey writing and language polishing, yet the final stage of LaTeX formatting and template adaptation remains a neglected and error-prone bottleneck.We identify an execution illusion, where LLMs produce linguistically fluent but unexecutable LaTeX code.To address this, we introduce TransLaTeX—the first reasoning-and-control framework that converts documents between scholarly templates with compiler-level verifiability.TransLaTeX achieves three key innovations:(1) Structure–content separation via placeholder masking, ensuring privacy and less token consumption;(2) SafeFormatBench, the first benchmark dedicated to executable LaTeX generation and template conversion; and(3) Execution-grounded verification across compilation, policy compliance, and visual consistency.TransLaTeX outperforms Pandoc and full-text LLM baselines on SafeFormatBench in compilation rate, ACL policy compliance, and layout fidelity, effectively mitigating the execution illusion.