HealMed: Multilingual Evaluation of Large Language Models in Medicine

Authors:Yingjian Chen, Fan Gao, Sherry T. Tong, Haoyu Zhang, Aosong Feng, Kevin W. Jin, Xing Wu, Jinghui Lu, Abdul Samad, Akbar Faruqi, Cesar Caraballo, Cibele Brandão, Dhruva (Drew)Gupta, Eunji Jeon, Gabriel Madera-Santiago, Geon Lee, Hugo Toshio Itikawa, Insook Cho, Isabelli Martins, Isarar Siddique, Israr Ahmed, Jihyo Kwak, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Luis Guilherme Cardoso, Minjin Kim, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Renee Dua, Santiago Gudiño-Rosales, Xiujie Chen, Zeo Lapalus, Zixin Xu, Michihiro Yasunaga, Rex Ying, Heuiseok Lim, Jaewoo Kang, Chanjun Park, Hang Jiang, Ethan Goh, Hyunjae Kim, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Qingyu Chen, Irene Li

Abstract:We present HealMed, an expert-reviewed benchmark for multilingual evaluation of large language models in medicine. HealMed contains 1,000 examples in each of nine languages, drawn from nine datasets and covering three task formats: MCQA, NLI and open-ended QA. The benchmark was developed over two years by 23 physicians and medical experts based across nine countries and regions. Each translation was evaluated and revised by two experts fluent in English and the corresponding target language. On HealMed, performance declined most in low-resource languages, although the size of the gap varied markedly across languages and models. The strongest proprietary models were the most stable across languages, whereas many open-source and medically specialized models showed larger and less consistent gaps. Medical specialization alone did not ensure multilingual robustness. Furthermore, expert revision could either raise or lower measured performance, indicating that translation quality materially affects cross-language evaluation results.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.19981 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.19981v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.19981 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)