MPIB: A Benchmark for Medical Prompt Injection Attacks and Clinical Safety in LLMs

Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are increasingly integrated into clinical workflows. However, prompt injection attacks can steer these systems toward clinically unsafe or misleading outputs. We introduce the Medical Prompt Injection Benchmark (MPIB), a dataset-and-benchmark suite for evaluating clinical safety under both direct prompt injection and indirect, RAG-mediated injection across clinically grounded tasks. MPIB emphasizes outcome-level risk via the Clinical Harm Event Rate (CHER), which measures high-severity clinical harm events under a clinically grounded taxonomy, and reports CHER alongside ASR$_2$ to distinguish moderate-or-worse from high-severity outcomes. The benchmark comprises 9,697 curated instances constructed through multi-stage quality gates and clinical safety linting. Evaluating MPIB across a diverse set of baseline LLMs and defense configurations, we find that ASR$_2$ and CHER$_3$ can diverge substantially, and that observed rates vary depending on whether adversarial instructions appear in the user query or in retrieved context. The MPIB dataset and evaluation code are available on Hugging Face and GitHub, respectively.

19 pages, 7 figures, 18 tables. Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2602.06268 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2602.06268v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.06268 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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