arXiv Computation and Language

Towards Reliable Medical LLMs: Benchmarking and Enhancing Confidence Estimation of Large Language Models in Medical Consultation

The paper introduces the first benchmark for evaluating confidence estimation in large language models during multi‑turn medical consultations, combining three types of medical data and an information sufficiency gradient to capture how confidence and correctness evolve as evidence accumulates. Experiments with 27 methods reveal that token‑level and consistency‑level confidence approaches are limited by medical data, and that medical reasoning must be judged on both diagnostic accuracy and information completeness. Building on these findings, the authors propose MedConf, a retrieval‑augmented, linguistically grounded self‑assessment framework that aligns patient information with supporting, missing, and contradictory relations, producing interpretable confidence estimates that outperform existing methods across multiple datasets and LLMs.

arXiv AI
Jul 16

Ask Before You Diagnose: Safe-Psych, a Sequential Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs in Psychiatry

arXiv:2607. 13036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision support in healthcare, but clinical evidence is often incomplete or evolving.

By Oriana Presacan, Andreea Grama, Larisa Irimin\u{a}, Alireza Nik, Jaya Ojha, Vajira Thambawita, Ciprian I. B\u{a}cil\u{a}, Bogdan Ionescu, Michael A. Riegler
arXiv AI
Jun 17

AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows

arXiv:2606. 17474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care.

By Jiahui Niu, Huizi Yu, Wenkong Wang, Guangxin Dai, Jingxian He, Xiang Li, Zhiying Liang, Xinxin Lin, Kent CY So, Bryan YP Yan, Yun Kwok Wing, Yanqiu Xing, Xin Ma, Lizhou Fan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Medical Causal Hypothesis Verification with Large Language Models

The paper "Medical Causal Hypothesis Verification with Large Language Models" reports a small-scale study evaluating eight LLMs on 17 medical causal hypotheses. The authors introduce an evaluation framework and annotate 1,067 evidence points across six criteria, using nine metrics to assess performance. Results show that while LLMs have strong recall, they frequently fail to provide valid scientific articles, evidence, or reject unsupported hypotheses, revealing a critical limitation for their use in healthcare.

By Safiyyah Ahmed, Abrar Ansari, Md Aminul Islam, Elena Zheleva
arXiv AI
Aug 3

Reasoning in Real World Clinical Care: Why Large Language Models Are Not Yet Safe for Autonomous Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2607. 28677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM now pass medical licensing examinations and, in curated cases, can rival physicians at diagnostic reasoning.

By Shayndhan Sivanathan, Shravan Nageswaran, Mehdi Zadem, Ryaan Sultan, Nicolas von Mallinckrodt, Max Solovyev, Alexey Matyushkin, Sumon Sadhu, Gabriele C DeLuca, Sanjeeva Jeyaretna, James Hillis, Manoj Ramachandran, Prakash Jayakumar
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Information-seeking failures of large language models in agentic clinical reasoning

arXiv:2607. 10275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve high scores on medical knowledge assessments, yet clinical reasoning requires actively deciding what to investigate under uncertainty.

By Krischan Braitsch, Laura K. Schmalbrock, Theresa Weltermann, Andrew F. Berdel, Isabella Miller, Kai Tran, Michael Heider, Sabrina Kraus, Florian Bassermann, Jacqueline Lammert, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Marcus Makowski, Lisa C. Adams, Keno K. Bressem