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Main Authors: Lopez, Ivan, Everett, Selin S., Bunning, Bryan J., Liang, April S., Yao, Dong Han, Vedak, Shivam C., Black, Kameron C., Ostmeier, Sophie, Ma, Stephen P., Alsentzer, Emily, Chen, Jonathan H., Chaudhari, Akshay S., Horvitz, Eric
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14158
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author Lopez, Ivan
Everett, Selin S.
Bunning, Bryan J.
Liang, April S.
Yao, Dong Han
Vedak, Shivam C.
Black, Kameron C.
Ostmeier, Sophie
Ma, Stephen P.
Alsentzer, Emily
Chen, Jonathan H.
Chaudhari, Akshay S.
Horvitz, Eric
author_facet Lopez, Ivan
Everett, Selin S.
Bunning, Bryan J.
Liang, April S.
Yao, Dong Han
Vedak, Shivam C.
Black, Kameron C.
Ostmeier, Sophie
Ma, Stephen P.
Alsentzer, Emily
Chen, Jonathan H.
Chaudhari, Akshay S.
Horvitz, Eric
contents Large language models (LLMs) are entering clinician workflows, yet evaluations rarely measure how clinician reasoning shapes model behavior during clinical interactions. We combined 61 New England Journal of Medicine Case Records with 92 real-world clinician-AI interactions to evaluate 21 reasoning LLM variants across 8 frontier models on differential diagnosis generation and next step recommendations under three conditions: reasoning alone, after expert clinician context, and after adversarial clinician context. LLM-clinician concordance increased substantially after clinician exposure, with simulations sharing >=3 differential diagnosis items rising from 65.8% to 93.5% and >=3 next step recommendations from 20.3% to 53.8%. Expert context significantly improved correct final diagnosis inclusion across all 21 models (mean +20.4 percentage points), reflecting both reasoning improvement and passive content echoing, while adversarial context caused significant diagnostic degradation in 14 models (mean -5.4 percentage points). Multi-turn disagreement probes revealed distinct model phenotypes ranging from highly conformist to dogmatic, with adversarial arguments remaining a persistent vulnerability even for otherwise resilient models. Inference-time scaling reduced harmful echoing of clinician-introduced recommendations across WHO-defined harm severity tiers (relative reductions: 62.7% mild, 57.9% moderate, 76.3% severe, 83.5% death-tier). In GPT-4o experiments, explicit clinician uncertainty signals improved diagnostic performance after adversarial context (final diagnosis inclusion 27% to 42%) and reduced alignment with incorrect arguments by 21%. These findings establish a foundation for evaluating clinician-AI collaboration, introducing interactive metrics and mitigation strategies essential for safety and robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14158
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Clinician input steers frontier AI models toward both accurate and harmful decisions
Lopez, Ivan
Everett, Selin S.
Bunning, Bryan J.
Liang, April S.
Yao, Dong Han
Vedak, Shivam C.
Black, Kameron C.
Ostmeier, Sophie
Ma, Stephen P.
Alsentzer, Emily
Chen, Jonathan H.
Chaudhari, Akshay S.
Horvitz, Eric
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are entering clinician workflows, yet evaluations rarely measure how clinician reasoning shapes model behavior during clinical interactions. We combined 61 New England Journal of Medicine Case Records with 92 real-world clinician-AI interactions to evaluate 21 reasoning LLM variants across 8 frontier models on differential diagnosis generation and next step recommendations under three conditions: reasoning alone, after expert clinician context, and after adversarial clinician context. LLM-clinician concordance increased substantially after clinician exposure, with simulations sharing >=3 differential diagnosis items rising from 65.8% to 93.5% and >=3 next step recommendations from 20.3% to 53.8%. Expert context significantly improved correct final diagnosis inclusion across all 21 models (mean +20.4 percentage points), reflecting both reasoning improvement and passive content echoing, while adversarial context caused significant diagnostic degradation in 14 models (mean -5.4 percentage points). Multi-turn disagreement probes revealed distinct model phenotypes ranging from highly conformist to dogmatic, with adversarial arguments remaining a persistent vulnerability even for otherwise resilient models. Inference-time scaling reduced harmful echoing of clinician-introduced recommendations across WHO-defined harm severity tiers (relative reductions: 62.7% mild, 57.9% moderate, 76.3% severe, 83.5% death-tier). In GPT-4o experiments, explicit clinician uncertainty signals improved diagnostic performance after adversarial context (final diagnosis inclusion 27% to 42%) and reduced alignment with incorrect arguments by 21%. These findings establish a foundation for evaluating clinician-AI collaboration, introducing interactive metrics and mitigation strategies essential for safety and robustness.
title Clinician input steers frontier AI models toward both accurate and harmful decisions
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14158