The paper investigates how misleading context—specifically fabricated evidence and bare assertions—affects large language models’ medical question‑answering performance. Experiments on MedMisBench show that models are more prone to adopt answers based on assertions than fabricated evidence, and that these misleading cues are often disclosed in reasoning traces but rarely in final responses. A monitor that reads open reasoning traces can detect most corrupted decisions, whereas monitoring only responses is less effective.
By Robin Linzmayer, No\'emie Elhadad
The paper introduces Gated Activation Steering, an inference-time intervention that jointly mitigates hallucination and sycophancy in medical question answering. By learning separate steering directions from contrastive clinical pairs and applying them to specific attention heads, the method uses behavior‑specific gates to intervene only when needed. Experiments on EHR‑based clinical questions show that the 4‑billion‑parameter model with gated steering outperforms its unsteered counterpart and rivals larger models in resisting user pressure.
By Himanshu Tripathi, Subash Neupane, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Shahram Rahimi
arXiv:2602. 23971v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts.
By Magda Dubois, Cozmin Ududec, Christopher Summerfield, Lennart Luettgau
arXiv:2603. 09986v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucinations, the tendency for large language models to provide responses with factually incorrect and unsupported claims, is a serious problem within natural language processing for which we do not yet have an effective solution to mitigate against.
By Brandon C. Colelough, Davis Bartels, Dina Demner-Fushman
arXiv:2608.28623v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large multimodal reasoning models (LMRMs) are getting increasingly capable, primarily through generating explicit chain-of-thought reasoning before a...
By Mahir Numayeer Islam, Gakuto Okuyama, Nikolaus Siauw, Shivank Garg, Madhur Panwar, Vasu Sharma
arXiv:2606. 07237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in healthcare for tasks such as clinical question answering, diagnosis support, and report summarization.
By Mahdi Alkaeed
arXiv:2607. 27304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical vision-language models (VLMs) generate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning before answering clinical questions, but whether this reasoning causally influences predictions remains unclear.
By Supratik Bhowal, Subhrajyoti Basu, Aritra Gir Mahanta, Anik Pal Chowdhury
arXiv:2601. 09853v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world health questions from patients often unintentionally embed false assumptions or premises.
By Sraavya Sambara, Yuan Pu, Ayman Ali, Vishala Mishra, Lionel Wong, Monica Agrawal
arXiv:2607. 14109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central challenges in natural language understanding.
By Inder Preet, Shuxin Lin, Dhaval Patel
arXiv:2608. 09080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in medical question answering and clinical reasoning tasks.
By Maryam Tahermazandarani, Adnan Mahmood, Fahmida Islam, Quan Z. Sheng
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:2608. 10258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly provide conversational health information that may influence treatment decisions, yet existing benchmarks do not isolate whether medication-safety boundaries persist across follow-ups after explicit self-treatment intent.
By Waleed Jamil, Raphael Schmitt