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

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review

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

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
EditorsMaria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages16150-16164
Number of pages15
Volume1
ISBN (electronic)979-8-89176-390-6
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2026
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Abbreviated titleACL 2026
Conference number64
Duration2 - 7 July 2026
Website
Degree of recognitionInternational event
LocationGrand Hyatt Manchester San Diego
CitySan Diego
CountryUnited States of America

External IDs

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