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Main Authors: Ke, Yusong, Lin, Hongru, Ruan, Yuting, Tang, Junya, Li, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05505
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author Ke, Yusong
Lin, Hongru
Ruan, Yuting
Tang, Junya
Li, Li
author_facet Ke, Yusong
Lin, Hongru
Ruan, Yuting
Tang, Junya
Li, Li
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in medical question-answering (QA) scenarios. However, LLMs can generate hallucinations and nonfactual information, undermining their trustworthiness in high-stakes medical tasks. Conformal Prediction (CP) provides a statistically rigorous framework for marginal (average) coverage guarantees but has limited exploration in medical QA. This paper proposes an enhanced CP framework for medical multiple-choice question-answering (MCQA) tasks. By associating the non-conformance score with the frequency score of correct options and leveraging self-consistency, the framework addresses internal model opacity and incorporates a risk control strategy with a monotonic loss function. Evaluated on MedMCQA, MedQA, and MMLU datasets using four off-the-shelf LLMs, the proposed method meets specified error rate guarantees while reducing average prediction set size with increased risk level, offering a promising uncertainty evaluation metric for LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Correctness Coverage Evaluation for Medical Multiple-Choice Question Answering Based on the Enhanced Conformal Prediction Framework
Ke, Yusong
Lin, Hongru
Ruan, Yuting
Tang, Junya
Li, Li
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in medical question-answering (QA) scenarios. However, LLMs can generate hallucinations and nonfactual information, undermining their trustworthiness in high-stakes medical tasks. Conformal Prediction (CP) provides a statistically rigorous framework for marginal (average) coverage guarantees but has limited exploration in medical QA. This paper proposes an enhanced CP framework for medical multiple-choice question-answering (MCQA) tasks. By associating the non-conformance score with the frequency score of correct options and leveraging self-consistency, the framework addresses internal model opacity and incorporates a risk control strategy with a monotonic loss function. Evaluated on MedMCQA, MedQA, and MMLU datasets using four off-the-shelf LLMs, the proposed method meets specified error rate guarantees while reducing average prediction set size with increased risk level, offering a promising uncertainty evaluation metric for LLMs.
title Correctness Coverage Evaluation for Medical Multiple-Choice Question Answering Based on the Enhanced Conformal Prediction Framework
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05505