A Scalable Framework for Evaluating Health Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mallinar, Neil, Heydari, A. Ali, Liu, Xin, Faranesh, Anthony Z., Winslow, Brent, Hammerquist, Nova, Graef, Benjamin, Speed, Cathy, Malhotra, Mark, Patel, Shwetak, Prieto, Javier L., McDuff, Daniel, Metwally, Ahmed A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mallinar, Neil
Heydari, A. Ali
Liu, Xin
Faranesh, Anthony Z.
Winslow, Brent
Hammerquist, Nova
Graef, Benjamin
Speed, Cathy
Malhotra, Mark
Patel, Shwetak
Prieto, Javier L.
McDuff, Daniel
Metwally, Ahmed A.
author_facet Mallinar, Neil
Heydari, A. Ali
Liu, Xin
Faranesh, Anthony Z.
Winslow, Brent
Hammerquist, Nova
Graef, Benjamin
Speed, Cathy
Malhotra, Mark
Patel, Shwetak
Prieto, Javier L.
McDuff, Daniel
Metwally, Ahmed A.
contents Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing complex datasets. Recent studies demonstrate their potential to generate useful, personalized responses when provided with patient-specific health information that encompasses lifestyle, biomarkers, and context. As LLM-driven health applications are increasingly adopted, rigorous and efficient one-sided evaluation methodologies are crucial to ensure response quality across multiple dimensions, including accuracy, personalization and safety. Current evaluation practices for open-ended text responses heavily rely on human experts. This approach introduces human factors and is often cost-prohibitive, labor-intensive, and hinders scalability, especially in complex domains like healthcare where response assessment necessitates domain expertise and considers multifaceted patient data. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics: an evaluation framework that streamlines human and automated evaluation of open-ended questions by identifying gaps in model responses using a minimal set of targeted rubrics questions. Our approach is based on recent work in more general evaluation settings that contrasts a smaller set of complex evaluation targets with a larger set of more precise, granular targets answerable with simple boolean responses. We validate this approach in metabolic health, a domain encompassing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Our results demonstrate that Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics yield higher inter-rater agreement among expert and non-expert human evaluators, and in automated assessments, compared to traditional Likert scales, while requiring approximately half the evaluation time of Likert-based methods. This enhanced efficiency, particularly in automated evaluation and non-expert contributions, paves the way for more extensive and cost-effective evaluation of LLMs in health.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23339
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Scalable Framework for Evaluating Health Language Models
Mallinar, Neil
Heydari, A. Ali
Liu, Xin
Faranesh, Anthony Z.
Winslow, Brent
Hammerquist, Nova
Graef, Benjamin
Speed, Cathy
Malhotra, Mark
Patel, Shwetak
Prieto, Javier L.
McDuff, Daniel
Metwally, Ahmed A.
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing complex datasets. Recent studies demonstrate their potential to generate useful, personalized responses when provided with patient-specific health information that encompasses lifestyle, biomarkers, and context. As LLM-driven health applications are increasingly adopted, rigorous and efficient one-sided evaluation methodologies are crucial to ensure response quality across multiple dimensions, including accuracy, personalization and safety. Current evaluation practices for open-ended text responses heavily rely on human experts. This approach introduces human factors and is often cost-prohibitive, labor-intensive, and hinders scalability, especially in complex domains like healthcare where response assessment necessitates domain expertise and considers multifaceted patient data. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics: an evaluation framework that streamlines human and automated evaluation of open-ended questions by identifying gaps in model responses using a minimal set of targeted rubrics questions. Our approach is based on recent work in more general evaluation settings that contrasts a smaller set of complex evaluation targets with a larger set of more precise, granular targets answerable with simple boolean responses. We validate this approach in metabolic health, a domain encompassing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Our results demonstrate that Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics yield higher inter-rater agreement among expert and non-expert human evaluators, and in automated assessments, compared to traditional Likert scales, while requiring approximately half the evaluation time of Likert-based methods. This enhanced efficiency, particularly in automated evaluation and non-expert contributions, paves the way for more extensive and cost-effective evaluation of LLMs in health.
title A Scalable Framework for Evaluating Health Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23339