arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

From Causal Plausibility to Causal Reliability: Evaluating LLMs as Calibrated Direct Causal-Edge Classifiers

The study evaluates 12 instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs on six causal‑graph benchmarks, testing five prompting strategies and four confidence sources. Findings show that LLMs tend to over‑predict edges, misclassify indirect or reversed edges as direct, and exhibit high over‑confidence, while conventional confidence estimates are unreliable and agreement signals offer limited improvement. The results suggest LLMs should be used as externally validated soft causal priors rather than definitive causal‑structure evidence.

By Amit Kumar, Elnur Adl Zarabi, Suranjana Trivedy, Zhiqian Chen, Lei Zhang, Kaiqun Fu, Taoran Ji
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Med-V1: Small Language Models for Zero-shot and Scalable Biomedical Evidence Attribution

arXiv:2603. 05308v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assessing whether an article supports an assertion is essential for hallucination detection and claim verification.

By Qiao Jin, Yin Fang, Lauren He, Yifan Yang, Guangzhi Xiong, Zhizheng Wang, Nicholas Wan, Joey Chan, Donald C. Comeau, Robert Leaman, Charalampos S. Floudas, Aidong Zhang, Michael F. Chiang, Yifan Peng, Zhiyong Lu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

MedRAGChecker: Claim-Level Verification for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation

MedRAGChecker is a claim-level verification framework designed for biomedical retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). It decomposes generated answers into atomic claims and assesses each claim’s support by combining evidence‑grounded natural language inference with biomedical knowledge‑graph consistency signals. The aggregated claim decisions provide diagnostics that distinguish retrieval and generation failures, such as faithfulness, under‑evidence, contradiction, and safety‑critical errors, and the system is distilled into compact models for scalable evaluation.

By Yuelyu Ji, Min Gu Kwak, Hang Zhang, Xizhi Wu, Chenyu Li, Yanshan Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

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.

By Zhiyao Ren, Yibing Zhan, Siyuan Liang, Guozheng Ma, Baosheng Yu, Dacheng Tao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

When Retrieval Helps and Distracts: Evaluating Evidence-Generating LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification

The paper investigates evidence generation for biomedical claim verification, evaluating various large language models and retrieval strategies on the CARE-XAI benchmark. It finds that fine‑tuned LLMs excel at producing evidence, while biomedical classifiers still lead in verdict‑only prediction. PubMed retrieval helps on PubMed‑aligned datasets but can mislead on broader public‑health claims, prompting the authors to propose Bio‑GRACE, a diagnostic that normalizes gold references to assess retrieval utility.

By Pritam Deka, Prabhjot Singh
arXiv AI
3d ago

Evaluating and Improving Evidence-Grounded Fact-Checking in LLMs via Multi-Round Evidence Ablation

The paper introduces Fact-Ablated Evaluation (FAE), a framework that iteratively removes cited evidence to test whether large language models (LLMs) adjust their fact‑checking predictions accordingly. Experiments reveal that many off‑the‑shelf LLMs rely more on internal knowledge than on the provided evidence. To address this, the authors propose REAL, a training method that uses counterfactual evidence supervision to encourage LLMs to base veracity judgments on evidence, achieving better evidence‑dependent performance across four datasets.

By Xingyu Deng, Mingzi Cao, Nikolaos Aletras, Xi Wang, Mark Stevenson
arXiv AI
Aug 28

MedFabric: Gold Evidence Hides the Difficulty of Word-Level Medical Fabrication Detection

MedFabric is a new benchmark for detecting word‑level medical fabrications, comprising 646 fabricated statements each paired with a ground‑truth passage that shares the same LLM authorship and nearly identical wording. The study shows that current detectors perform poorly—expert clinicians achieve only 53.3% macro‑F1 and no detector family surpasses 60% without gold evidence—highlighting that detection hinges on evidence correctness rather than subtlety of fabrication. The authors demonstrate that a retrieval‑confidence gate can substantially improve performance, raising macro‑F1 from 61% to 74%.

By Tung Sum Thomas Kwok, Qian Qian, Xiaofeng Lin, Dongxu Zhang, Jun Han, Zhichao Yang, Davin Hill, Tamer Soliman, Sanjit Singh Batra, Robert Tillman, Guang Cheng