aiqbench analysis
This research introduces a scalable evaluation framework for biomedical LLMs that moves beyond simple accuracy metrics to assess robustness, format compliance, and structural reasoning capabilities like PICO extraction. By applying this pipeline to Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, the study demonstrates that a sequential SFT-to-RL training regime significantly outperforms base or single-stage methods on complex medical tasks without requiring frontier model resources. The findings offer a practical methodology for validating specialized AI judges in domains where high-quality human annotations are scarce.
Beyond Correctness: Validity-Oriented Evaluation of Biomedical LLM Judges
arXiv:2608.29127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a scalable, validity-oriented pipeline for evaluating biomedical LLM judges when high-quality human judgments are scarce. First, we augment existing human-labelled biomedical benchmarks with deterministic, metric-grounded mutations that produce auditable preference pairs. Second, we evaluate judges beyond aggregate correctness using three deployment-relevant dimensions: correctness against metric-derived gold labels, robustness under repeated stochastic sampling, and compliance with the requested output format. We use this pipeline to assess Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct under four regimes: (1) base, using the instruct model as is; (2) SFT, distillation-based supervised fine-tuning only; (3) RL, GRPO-based reinforcement learning only; and (4) SFT$\rightarrow$RL, SFT followed by RL. The base and single-stage regimes struggle on structured medical discrimination such as PICO extraction and clinical calculations, whereas SFT$\rightarrow$RL performs best across correctness, compliance, and robustness; gains concentrate on decomposable tasks (PICO, MedCalc), at times matching or outperforming frontier models.
Abstract:We propose a scalable, validity-oriented pipeline for evaluating biomedical LLM judges when high-quality human judgments are scarce. First, we augment existing human-labelled biomedical benchmarks with deterministic, metric-grounded mutations that produce auditable preference pairs. Second, we evaluate judges beyond aggregate correctness using three deployment-relevant dimensions: correctness against metric-derived gold labels, robustness under repeated stochastic sampling, and compliance with the requested output format. We use this pipeline to assess Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct under four regimes: (1) base, using the instruct model as is; (2) SFT, distillation-based supervised fine-tuning only; (3) RL, GRPO-based reinforcement learning only; and (4) SFT$\rightarrow$RL, SFT followed by RL. The base and single-stage regimes struggle on structured medical discrimination such as PICO extraction and clinical calculations, whereas SFT$\rightarrow$RL performs best across correctness, compliance, and robustness; gains concentrate on decomposable tasks (PICO, MedCalc), at times matching or outperforming frontier models.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2608.29127 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.29127v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29127 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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