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: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
The paper introduces CLEAR, an agentic framework designed to improve the reliability of large language models (LLMs) in medical contexts by adjudicating evidence from multiple sources. CLEAR generates candidate answers from three distinct pathways—parametric knowledge, locally curated corpora, and dynamically retrieved evidence—and then uses an aggregation verifier to evaluate agreement and conflict among these sources. An adjudication module decides whether to preserve or revise conclusions, employing override-guard and challenge-audit mechanisms, and initiates targeted follow-up searches when conflicts remain unresolved.
By Shuai Wang, Yize Zhao, Qingyu Chen
arXiv:2607. 21859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Constructing causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is a core step in biomedical causal analysis, yet it remains a largely manual process.
By Yi-han Sheu, Michael R. Steigman, Yu Zhou, Bo Wang, Fan-Yu Yen, Jordan W. Smoller
The paper introduces BAR, a Budget‑Aware LLM Reasoning framework that enhances post‑discharge risk prediction by integrating external medical knowledge graphs (KGs). BAR refines KGs into disease‑specific evidence graphs with support scores and provenance, then uses an LLM to plan, navigate, and verify evidence within a patient‑specific budget. Experiments on MIMIC‑III and MIMIC‑IV across eight diseases show BAR improves AUPRC by 3.4 points, raises citation precision from 59.8% to 77.9%, and uses only 62‑65% of the allotted budget.
By Chen Chen, Dongjie Wang, Mei Liu, Zijun Yao
arXiv:2404.06349v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The ability to understand causality significantly impacts the competence of large language models (LLMs) in output explanation and counterfactual r...
By Yu Zhou, Xingyu Wu, Jibin Wu, Liang Feng, Kay Chen Tan
arXiv:2608.29582v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) primarily focus on factual knowledge retrieval, overlooking the fundamental challenge of navigati...
By Yi Yu, Bo Wang, Chong Feng, Ge Shi, Xia Liu, Ziyi Yang, Xuewen Shi
The paper discusses how large language models (LLMs) can be fine‑tuned with observational data to improve alignment with human preferences and business goals. It highlights that directly using such data can cause models to learn spurious correlations, and introduces DeconfoundLM, a method that removes known confounders from reward signals. Experiments show that DeconfoundLM better recovers causal relationships and outperforms baseline methods by over 16% in objective score when confounding is present.
By Erfan Loghmani
The paper investigates why retrieval‑based open‑ended evaluation fails in medical fact verification. By creating two detailed taxonomies—one for retrieval‑stage errors across five quality dimensions and another for verifier‑reasoning errors across six steps—the authors automatically label evidence quality and reasoning errors using an LLM‑as‑Judge pipeline. Their large‑scale stress tests across multiple retrieval methods and verifier models show that increasing model size, reasoning effort, source breadth, or medical fine‑tuning does not eliminate these failure modes, indicating fundamental limits of the retrieve‑then‑verify paradigm in open‑ended medical contexts.
By Heyuan Huang, Jirui Dai, Alexandra DeLucia, Sonal Joshi, Mahsa Yarmohammadi, Jie Gao, Bernal Jim\'enez Guti\'errez, Mark Dredze
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
The paper investigates the causal impact of the symptom "chest pain" on medical diagnosis predictions, moving beyond traditional correlation-based methods. Using the CausaLM framework, the authors generate counterfactual text representations that effectively remove the symptom, allowing for a principled estimation of its causal effect on disease predictions. They apply Textual Representation-based Average Treatment Effect (TReATE) to quantify how the presence or absence of chest pain shapes diagnostic outcomes, and compare these results to correlation-based baselines such as CONEXP, providing deeper insight into the decision-making behavior of clinical NLP models.
By Alexander Romanus, Mehul Shetty, Connor Jordan
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