Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted for clinical question answering (QA). Current systems can attach citations to their answers, but these often point to broad texts, leaving time-pressed clinicians unable to verify them efficiently. An alternative is to ensure that responses are verifiable by construction: providing fine-grained verbatim quotes from reference material that substantiate claims, so users can verify an answer without opening other documents. In this paper, we evaluate the ability of current models to perform this task end-to-end: from providing citations for every factual claim, to producing verbatim quotes, to ensuring that those quotes fully substantiate the claims. To do so, we build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate fourteen LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring each of these stages separately. We find that most models can attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of their claims from prompting alone, apart from some lightweight models such as claude-haiku-4.5. Yet these quotes often fail to substantiate every detail of the claims they accompany. For instance, claude-opus-5 produces verbatim quotes for 98.0% of its claims, but fully substantiates only 37.1%. Our work provides insights into the current capability gap of LLMs in building verifiable clinical QA systems, along with artifacts for future research.
Leaderboards are a popular way to compare large language model (LLM) capabilities and can influence how model developers invest resources. We ask when competition on leaderboards leads developers to produce models with similar capability profiles, which we call monoculture, or similar performance levels. We study this by formulating leaderboard competition as a game in which model developers invest resources across capabilities to maximize their win rate. We show that similar production functions can induce similar capability profiles, while comparative advantage can sustain distinct capability profiles. We then study convergence in performance levels and show that diminishing returns can lead to an increasingly crowded competitive frontier. Using data from LM Arena and OpenRouter, we find that developers improve more in categories where they lag competitors, while still retaining category-specific advantages. At the same time, we find that the frontier of models becomes increasingly crowded, alongside increasingly diversified model usage patterns. Our results suggest that increasing competition does not need to produce interchangeable models, but can instead sustain competitive models with distinct strengths.
Yiling Chen, Shi Feng, Grant Schoenebeck, Fang-Yi Yu
AI 速读 基于摘要
提出一种基于Kendall tau成对一致性的序数同行预测机制,在Bayesian Stochastically Order Consistent模型类下证明真实报告具有随机占优性。
cs.GT
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Ordinal information is central to tasks ranging from conference peer review to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback for large language models. In many such settings, there is no objective ground truth against which reports can be directly verified, making incentive-compatible elicitation challenging. Peer-prediction mechanisms have been designed to achieve truthful elicitation despite the lack of ground-truth verification. However, existing peer-prediction methods do not provide incentives for agents to truthfully compress rich private information (e.g. reviews) into coarser ordinal reports (e.g. rankings) requested by the mechanisms. We propose a simple ordinal peer-prediction mechanism that rewards agents based on pairwise agreement, measured by Kendall tau. Under a broad class of Bayesian Stochastically Order Consistent models---which includes classical models such as Mallows and Thurstone---we prove that truthful reporting is stochastically dominant, and strongly truthful under index-equivariant strategies. This provides robust incentives even for agents with non-linear utility functions, such as risk aversion. Our mechanism further accommodates heterogeneous agents, top-K reports, and subset assignments, where each agent is scored against one randomly drawn peer. Experiments on synthetic Mallows and Thurstone data, together with a real-data stress test on the SUSHI preference dataset, show right-shifted truthful-payment distributions and the highest normalized sensitivity among tested baselines.