arXiv Computation and Language

Accessed, never disclosed: Silent access to protected health information by medical artificial intelligence agents

The study investigates how medical AI agents can silently access protected health information (PHI) without revealing it, a practice that bypasses the HIPAA minimum‑necessary standard. By embedding canaries in synthetic patient records, the authors evaluated five language models across multiple boundary settings and attack scenarios, finding that some models accessed PHI unnecessarily while stricter boundaries and pre‑execution gates largely mitigated this behavior. The research demonstrates that output‑only evaluations fail to detect such covert access, underscoring the need for combined boundary controls, gating mechanisms, and access‑log audits.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

Addressing Benchmarking Gaps in Large Language Models for Health and Medicine with Dynamic Red-Teaming

arXiv:2508. 00923v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer health-related questions and support healthcare workflows, yet evidence for their safety still relies heavily on static benchmarks that can rapidly become obsolete or be optimized against.

By Jiazhen Pan (Cherise), Bailiang Jian (Cherise), Paul Hager (Cherise), Yundi Zhang (Cherise), Che Liu (Cherise), Friederike Jungmann (Cherise), Hongwei Bran Li (Cherise), Julian Canisius (Cherise), Chenyu You (Cherise), Junde Wu (Cherise), Jiayuan Zhu (Cherise), Fenglin Liu (Cherise), Yuyuan Liu (Cherise), Niklas Bubeck (Cherise), Moritz Knolle (Cherise), Chen (Cherise), Chen (Cherise), Christian Wachinger, Zhenyu Gong, Cheng Ouyang, Georgios Kaissis, Benedikt Wiestler, Daniel Rueckert
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

CARE: Privacy-Compliant Agentic Reasoning with Evidence Discordance

The paper introduces MIMIC-DOS, a dataset derived from MIMIC-IV that focuses on ICU cases where patient symptoms and medical signs are discordant. It presents CARE, a privacy‑compliant multi‑stage agentic reasoning framework that uses a proprietary LLM to generate structured categories and transitions, while a local LLM performs evidence acquisition and decision‑making. In retrospective evaluations on MIMIC‑DOS, CARE outperforms other LLMs and agentic workflows, demonstrating stronger handling of conflicting clinical evidence while preserving patient privacy.

By Haochen Liu, Weien Li, Rui Song, Zeyu Li, Chun Jason Xue, Xiao-Yang Liu, Sam Nallaperuma-Herzberg, Xue Liu, Ye Yuan
arXiv AI
Jul 29

PatientAgentBench: A Benchmark Framework for Evaluating Patient-Facing Health AI Agents

arXiv:2607. 25485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Health AI is evolving from answering questions to agentic systems that converse with patients, reason about health records, and act on their behalf.

By Korosh Vatanparvar, Ashutosh Joshi, Maria Xenochristou, Mohammad Abuzar Hashemi, Prasad Kasu, Deepak Bansal, Daniel Lopez-Martinez, Anchal Nema, Ramya Ganesan, Will Kimbrough, Alex Woody, Yadunandana Rao, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Wilko Schulz-Mahlendorf
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Automated screening of privacy risks in medical AI

The paper introduces a lightweight screening tool that evaluates individual patient vulnerability to membership inference attacks across thousands of medical AI models. By measuring attack scores for each patient, the authors found that certain records consistently rank high in risk regardless of training settings, and that stronger weight decay can reduce overall exposure but not the identity of the most at‑risk patients. The tool uses four small models to flag high‑risk patients before a production model is trained, aiming to integrate privacy assessment into clinical AI data preparation.

By Konstantinos Vrettos, Eleftherios Tzanis, Haridimos Kondylakis, Evangelia E. Vassalou, Florence X. Doo, Michail E. Klontzas
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

Agent Mosaic: Recognizing Confidentiality Leaks in Agentic LLM Systems

The paper investigates how large language model agents can inadvertently leak confidential information by combining data from multiple documents—a phenomenon termed the "mosaic effect." Using 30 synthetic cybersecurity, medical, and military scenarios, the authors generate 10,800 simulated and 1,440 live answers from three LLM agents, finding that even the best model discloses forbidden composites in over 7% of simulated responses. While visible classification headers and aggregation rules reduce disclosure rates, unsafe disclosures remain in roughly one third of simulated answers, and increased refusals do not fully prevent leakage of prohibited conclusions.

By Daniel Ruiz, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Synthetic Hospital: An Open, Verifiable, Physician-Validated Longitudinal EHR Benchmark

Synthetic Hospital is an open, fully synthetic longitudinal electronic health record benchmark created from public medical education material. It contains 1,268 patients and 5,602 encounters, with every diagnosis, finding, and temporal relation grounded in standard ontologies and traceable back to its source. Physicians could not reliably distinguish its records from real charts, and current frontier AI models perform significantly below human experts on tasks such as reconstructing problem lists and summarizing charts.

By Christine Park, Valerie Chen, Tim Dettmers
arXiv AI
Oct 26

When Clinical Judgment Becomes a Predictive Shortcut: Two Questions Clinical AI Must Answer Before Deployment

The article discusses how Clinical AI can predict outcomes based on data generated by existing clinical judgment, but such performance alone does not prove usefulness before recognition or across care processes. It proposes evidence requirements tailored to the intended use and information conditions, including state‑reference and proxy‑relative timing tests, to strengthen recognition claims. The framework aims to help hospitals determine whether the conditions that support performance are present when assistance is most needed, making questions that current evaluation practices overlook explicit and specifying the direct evidence required to answer them.

By Jing Yang, Long R. Jiao, Zongjiu Zhang, Xiujun Cai
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MedDeID enables locally governed clinical-text de-identification from real or synthetic training data

MedDeID is an on‑premises framework that combines in‑house annotation, synthetic‑note generation, model training, inference, pseudonymisation and evaluation to de‑identify clinical text. On a Dutch hospital benchmark, a hospital‑trained transformer detected 98.9 % of identifying text while redacting only 0.24 % of non‑identifier text; a synthetic‑only model achieved 96.1 %. In primary‑care notes, the synthetic‑trained model outperformed the hospital‑trained model in recall and robustness to identifier‑format changes, and an English version trained without real text reached 99.7 % and 98.9 % detection on synthetic benchmarks.

By Stig Hellemans, Tom Stroobants, Elyne Scheurwegs, Pieter Meysman, Philippe G. Jorens, Kris Laukens
arXiv AI
Jun 17

First, do NOHARM: towards clinically safe large language models

arXiv:2512. 01241v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are routinely used by physicians and patients for medical advice, yet their clinical safety profiles remain poorly characterized.

By David Wu, Fateme Nateghi Haredasht, Saloni Kumar Maharaj, Priyank Jain, Jessica Tran, Matthew Gwiazdon, Arjun Rustagi, Jenelle Jindal, Jacob M. Koshy, Vinay Kadiyala, Anup Agarwal, Bassman Tappuni, Brianna French, Sirus Jesudasen, Christopher V. Cosgriff, Rebanta Chakraborty, Jillian Caldwell, Susan Ziolkowski, David J. Iberri, Robert Diep, Rahul S. Dalal, Kira L. Newman, Kristin Galetta, J. Carl Pallais, Nancy Wei, Kathleen M. Buchheit, David I. Hong, Vartan Pahalyants, Ernest Y. Lee, Allen Shih, Tamara B. Kaplan, Vishnu Ravi, Sarita Khemani, Thomas A. Buckley, April S. Liang, Daniel Shirvani, Advait Patil, Nicholas Marshall, Kanav Chopra, Joel Koh, Adi Badhwar, Anastasia Perez, Austin J. Schoeffler, Mahbuba Tusty, Chase M. Walton, Liam G. McCoy, David J. H. Wu, Yingjie Weng, Sumant Ranji, Kevin Schulman, Nigam H. Shah, Jason Hom, Arnold Milstein, Arjun K. Manrai, Adam Rodman, Jonathan H. Chen, Ethan Goh