MediEval: A Unified Medical Benchmark for Patient-Contextual and Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning in LLMs

Publikation: Beitrag in Buch/Konferenzbericht/Sammelband/Gutachten › Beitrag in Konferenzband › Beigetragen › Begutachtung

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to medicine, yet their adoption is limited by concerns over reliability and safety. Existing evaluations either test factual medical knowledge in isolation or assess patient-level reasoning without verifying correctness, leaving a critical gap. We introduce MediEval, a benchmark that links MIMIC-IV electronic health records (EHRs) to a unified knowledge base built from UMLS and other biomedical vocabularies. MediEval generates diverse factual and counterfactual medical statements within real patient contexts, enabling systematic evaluation across a 4-quadrant framework that jointly considers knowledge grounding and contextual consistency. Using this framework, we identify critical failure modes, including hallucinated support and truth inversion, that current proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific LLMs frequently exhibit. To address these risks, we propose Counterfactual Risk-Aware Fine-tuning (CoRFu), a DPO-based method with an asymmetric penalty targeting unsafe confusions. CoRFu improves by +16.4 macro-F1 points over the base model and eliminates truth inversion errors, demonstrating both higher accuracy and substantially greater safety.

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
TitelProceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Redakteure/-innenMaria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Herausgeber (Verlag)Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Seiten16150-16164
Seitenumfang15
Band1
ISBN (elektronisch)979-8-89176-390-6
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - Juli 2026
Peer-Review-StatusJa

Konferenz

Titel64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
KurztitelACL 2026
Veranstaltungsnummer64
Dauer2 - 7 Juli 2026
Webseite
BekanntheitsgradInternationale Veranstaltung
OrtGrand Hyatt Manchester San Diego
StadtSan Diego
LandUSA/Vereinigte Staaten

Externe IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-5458-8645/work/232161051