Reliable and diverse evaluation of LLM medical knowledge mastery

TL;DR

This paper introduces PretexEval, a novel framework for reliably and diversely evaluating medical knowledge mastery in LLMs by generating variant test samples that address factual errors and lack of diversity.

Contribution

The study presents a new evaluation framework using predicate equivalence transformations to produce reliable, diverse test samples for assessing medical knowledge in LLMs.

Findings

Current LLMs show significant gaps in medical knowledge mastery.

Existing benchmarks may overestimate LLMs' medical understanding.

LLMs need improved in-depth medical knowledge before clinical application.

Abstract

Mastering medical knowledge is crucial for medical-specific LLMs. However, despite the existence of medical benchmarks like MedQA, a unified framework that fully leverages existing knowledge bases to evaluate LLMs' mastery of medical knowledge is still lacking. In the study, we propose a novel framework PretexEval that dynamically generates reliable and diverse test samples to evaluate LLMs for any given medical knowledge base. We notice that test samples produced directly from knowledge bases by templates or LLMs may introduce factual errors and also lack diversity. To address these issues, we introduce a novel schema into our proposed evaluation framework that employs predicate equivalence transformations to produce a series of variants for any given medical knowledge point. Finally, these produced predicate variants are converted into textual language, resulting in a series of reliable and diverse test samples to evaluate whether LLMs fully master the given medical factual knowledge point. Here, we use our proposed framework to systematically investigate the mastery of medical factual knowledge of 12 well-known LLMs, based on two knowledge bases that are crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment. The evaluation results illustrate that current LLMs still exhibit significant deficiencies in fully mastering medical knowledge, despite achieving considerable success on some famous public benchmarks. These new findings provide valuable insights for developing medical-specific LLMs, highlighting that current LLMs urgently need to strengthen their comprehensive and in-depth mastery of medical knowledge before being applied to real-world medical scenarios.